Q: I have a brand new website that already ranks well on Google, but I have a problem. Currently, the page being returned by Google is the ‘About’ page, which is not ideal. The key landing page is the Home Page. I am now thinking that I should perhaps take the ‘About’ page out of the SEO equation altogether – perhaps with a no-index, no-follow tag. Is this a good idea?

Essentially – I’m trying to figure out how to get my Home page returned in Google in place of the current ‘About’ page. Can you help?

A: We don’t recommend removing a high ranking page from robot indexing. Assuming this page contains robot-friendly links to other pages in the site, this page is transferring authority to the other pages, including your home page.

Since your site is new, it’s probably only a matter of time until the Home page makes its debut in the search results. In fact, you could probably just wait a few weeks and let this whole problem iron itself out. However, if you are feeling impatient, here are some ways to address your problem:

1. First, check that the Home page is indexed. Perform a “site” search on Google, following this syntax: site:www.yourdomain.com. (see our handy search shortcuts page for more on special searches such as this one).
2. If the Home page is not shown in the site: search results, add a text link pointing to the Home page from the About page. Next time the search engine robot comes around, it is likely to follow the link and discover the Home page.
3. You can also sign up with Google Webmaster Tools and check for indexing problems and make sure that Google isn’t having a problem with your home page.
4. If the Home page is, indeed, indexed, but just isn’t getting ranks compared to your About page, take an honest look at the two pages and ask yourself: does the About page contain more descriptive text? Juicier, more keyword rich text? Is the home page dominated by flashy graphics and not providing content that search engines can sink their teeth into? You may need to adjust your design if you want the Home page to have a better search engine presence.

Whether you take the above steps or not, we always recommend thinking of every page on your site as a potential landing page. So, if you’re not happy with the About page as a landing page the way it is now, go ahead and add great content to make it a better destination for your search visitors. Here are some ideas for making an “about” page a good landing page:

• Include a nice, juicy description of your company, offerings, and principals
• Add a call to action and a link such as “learn more about our services!”
• Make sure there’s a prominent link to the home page
• If you have a prominent company logo in your page header, make sure that it links to the home page as well – most website users expect this.
• Add a footer with contact information, and possibly even a short and snazzy tagline that describes what you do, who you serve, and why you do it well!

In the long run, your link-building efforts (which are great for SEO in general) are likely to improve your Home page’s ranks more than other pages on the site, since there’s a good chance you’ll get more inbound links directly to your Home page than to your About page. You could have worse problems – keep up the good work!

Q: I’ve noticed those little links at the bottom of websites that say “Website design by designersName.com”. I take it that those links are meant to improve search engine ranks?

Do you think this would be a better idea: Have the link at the bottom of the customer page point to an actual page on the customer’s site that is dedicated to you, the designer, and have a few hundred words of body text with relevant page titles, keywords, the whole sha-bang with links pointing to your site. What do you think of this? This would work a lot better than just the little link at the bottom of their page, wouldn’t it?

A: While we don’t have data, our guess is that the primary benefit of those links at the bottom of a client’s website is so that a visitor will say, “Oh, this is a cool site. Who built it?” and then follow the link to the designer’s site. Will this link provide search engine benefit? Yeah, a little bit, especially if you design lots of sites. But watch out: those sites aren’t going to be topically related to your website (how many of them are about web design?), so they aren’t going to deliver much search engine benefit.

Now, thinking about your Better Idea, where you get your own page on a client’s site. Sorry, we can’t give it the thumbs up, and here’s why:

Assuming you can get past the (probably substantial) obstacle of getting a client to agree to adding a whole page praising their web designer, we still don’t think that one page will be enough to make this seem like a truly relevant link in the eyes of the search engines. Google, for example, is not just looking at single pages to determine relevance, but rather the whole giant interconnected world of links and categories of information. Also, any human viewer (and Google has plenty of these on staff, too!) would be able to ascertain that this type of link is essentially a paid link. So our guess is that Google and the other search engines will think of the links coming from this type of page as having very little importance.

Also we’re a little worried about the potential for duplicate content. If you have a text-heavy page on someone else’s domain that contains very similar messaging to your own site, it won’t be good for your own search engine presence. Since it would function more like a landing page than an ad, we think it’d be best to keep that messaging – and the traffic that comes to read it – on your own website. After all, you’d hate to eventually find yourself competing with your own ads!

On the other hand, we suppose we can envision a scenario in which the tactic you suggest might be useful. Picture this: your client is a well established, authority site with great ranks, while your own website is having some sort of terrible problem (perhaps some previous spam has you in a rankings pit that you are working on climbing out of). If you aren’t visible at all in the search engines, you could approach your client as a sort of “host” for your one-page self-promotion. If you have a client who’s that nice, you’d better be prepared to send a nice holiday basket this year.

Thanks so much for the idea, and we encourage you to keep them coming! Experimentation is a valuable part of any SEO campaign.

Q: I have a business selling big and tall men’s coats online. I was going to start attempting to build some links as suggested in your book but it was suggested to me that if I managed to get too many links, that my site may get Google sandboxed as it is only 1 year old and may look suspect.

Could you tell me if this is maybe correct, and if so what speed should I try to get links added. My friend suggested 1 a week.

A: It’s true that there are penalties for websites building a lot of links in an “unnatural” way in a short time, but we don’t think this would be an issue for someone in your situation. We think this problem most often applies to spammers, scrapers, or people who own hundreds or thousands of domains and work to build status by interlinking between them. Your site contains real, unique content and a legitimate product, and should be able to build links naturally without any problems on the search engines.

If you are concerned that you’re building links too fast (that’s a pretty nice problem to have!), just be sure that they’re coming from a wide variety of types of sites (that is, they are not all from within comment postings, or bulletin boards, instead, they are a mix of blogs, social bookmarking sites, static sites, etc.), and most importantly, that as many links as possible are from sites that focus on similar content to your website. Keep your focus on the overall site quality and the relevance to your target audience and it’s very unlikely there will be any penalty.

Q: Do you know if it’s valuable to post links on Yahoo/MSN Group sites? From what I can see, the home pages of the various groups are indexed, but the links pages typically aren’t. Have you heard of people doing this to assist in link building?

A: There are a couple of ways to think about the value of this technique.

First, if you’re thinking about a straightforward participation marketing approach, in which you set out in good faith to join in on discussions, give advice based on your expertise, and position yourself as a “person of authority” on a relevant subject, then there can be great value in posting links within group discussion.  The chief value, of course, is that you are creating a positive awareness of your company for a targeted audience. Added to your thoughtfully written and useful information, a link in your signature might just entice some of those targeted folks to click through and visit your site. Participation marketing is time consuming, requires good writing skills and a thorough knowledge of the topic at hand. Incidentally, “thorough knowledge” is the reason that this kind of marketing is best done by a representative of the company itself, and is hard to farm out to a professional SEO.

Secondly, you might be wondering about the ranking boost you might gain from links posted to groups such as Yahoo and MSN. As you may be aware from reading our book, we are not the kind of searchies who follow the algorithmic importance of various linking techniques, because we are much more preoccupied with how these things affect the user. But, your question piqued our curiosity, so we took a few minutes to look. In the five minutes we spent looking at public and members-only Yahoo groups, we were drowning in spam postings and/or announcements from moderators talking about the proliferation of spam postings. Ick. Are the links indexed? Well, in the 15 minutes we looked into this, we couldn’t find hard evidence either way, but we suspect they aren’t. Not surprisingly, it appears that a group’s introductory page is likely to be indexed while the pages containing the actual postings are not.

What does this say to us? Well, it says that spam on forums is a huge problem, and if we realized that after looking for 5 minutes, then the search engines have already noticed it and have probably chosen to devalue or ignore links posted on these pages. It also means that the average group member is up to his or her ears in spam and won’t give the time of day to anything that’s not 100% appropriate and related to the topic of the group.

So, yes, there can be great value in being a useful and active member of a forum in your site’s topical community. But, in case you were thinking of tossing out random links (and we’re not saying you are!), don’t bother.

Q: I have a question about links. I have been researching other SEO sites and a few discuss a process of authoring and submitting articles to hundreds of article submission sites. Because each article has a link back to my site I would be creating hundreds of links to my site with each article I publish.

Is Article authoring a strategy you have an opinion on? Pros and Cons? I keep reading about the pros but no cons so far.

A: We love the idea of writing articles as part of your link building process. There are several approaches you could take:

1. The approach you mention, writing articles and submitting them to copyright-free distribution services
2. Creating a blog and posting your articles there
3. Writing articles and posting them on your own website
4. Writing articles and submitting to online or offline publications

Different strategies will work better for different people. Our own strategy has been #3, writing articles and posting them on our own website. We primarily promote these through social networking like digg and del.icio.us and naturally developed inbound links. You might want to look at our article about “Head Trauma: The Movie” for some ideas about social media marketing. We think that #2, posting articles to blogs, is also a very valuable option. If you work on becoming active in the blogosphere, having a lot of good articles on your blog will ultimately build your inbound links and credibility. Of course, you have to be willing/able to commit to regular posts. Option #4 has the advantage that you can target the audience.

The cons of option #1 – submitting your articles to free distribution websites such as Articlesbase or a zillion others – are that your content will be posted on websites that you can’t control, and some may not be of your choosing. This could detract from your credibility. You may not want your “sweat and blood” poured into an article to create Adsense revenue for others. And these articles don’t work for you in building your own blog content, reputation, and “trustrank.” Another obvious con is the time and effort involved in the writing and submittals. But yes, option #1 can be a good strategy if you are comfortable writing articles. Just be sure that you follow the advice inour SEO bookwhen we discuss this subject: make sure your content is going to be cited properly and will include a link back to your site.

Q: I recently asked a relevant website with a high Google PageRank value if they could link to a page on my website. They said they would gladly add a link if I could add one to their site somewhere on my website. Would this be damaging to my site? I have thought about setting up a links page with a noindex, nofollow tag so that Google will not pick up the link on our website. What should I do

A: Great question, but first a disclaimer: As you may know from reading our book, we really don’t keep too close an eye on the many ins and outs of Google’s algorithm. We are more likely to focus on what’s good for your site visitors than what’s good for your Google PageRank [Wikipedia]. Having said that, technically speaking reciprocal linking can put you at risk for diluting your PageRank.

We came across a recent quote from Matt Cutts’ blog (Matt is a “celebrity” Google engineer; he is Google’s unofficial ambassador to the SEO industry). Here, he talks about sites that he was reviewing as part of a panel for a conference:

“Several times during the session, it was readily apparent that someone had tried to do reciprocal links as a “quick hit” to increase their link popularity. When I saw that in the backlinks, I tried to communicate that 1) it was immediately obvious to me, and therefore our algorithms can do a pretty good job of spotting excessive reciprocal links, and 2) in the instances that I looked at, the reciprocal links weren’t doing any good. I urged folks to spend more time looking for ways to make a compelling site that attract viral buzz or word of mouth. Compelling sites that are well-marketed attract editorially chosen links, which tend to help a site more.”

See Matt’s full post here.

In our opinion, you’re talking about one link to a relevant site. You’re not setting up excessive reciprocal links, so we don’t think you’ll be penalized. Will you algorithmically “lose” a little RageRank value by linking back to the PR 6 site? Probably, but we think that you have more to gain than you have to lose by linking. There are so many sites out there that link back to each other due to true relevance, we’d be shocked if one or two reciprocal links could knock a site’s PR down significantly.

Regarding making a links page with a no index, no follow robots META tag, we don’t recommend it, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s not really in the spirit of what you’d be agreeing to do for the PR 6 site. They want a link that the search engines will see. And secondly, who knows, the PR 6 site will probably check your site and could drop your link due to the no index, no follow tag.

You say it’s a relevant site. In our opinion, relevance is the bottom line. Therefore, PageRank issues aside, if you think that the website would be helpful/useful/interesting to your visitors, we say go ahead and provide a link. If not, then don’t do it for the PageRank, because there are lots of other ways to drive targeted traffic to your site.

Q: I once had a program that would submit my website to all search engines. A person warned me about using that kind of program because the search engines will cut you off if you submit too often. Is that true?

A: We don’t have a definite answer about whether autosubmit programs will get you penalized or banned, but we can tell you that we don’t recommend doing it, and we don’t think it’s necessary.

There are only a few unique search engines with a big audience reach, and as you know from our book, those engines are Google (and AOL, which uses Google’s results), Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.  After submitting to the biggies that allow submittals, probably the best thing for you to do is look for niche directories and sites that speak to the same audience as your site, and approach these very targeted websites for a link or listing. This method of link building helps you focus on getting the specific audience you want to your site, and doesn’t waste your time or money on audiences that are too general or too tiny. You can look on our website for a sample link letter. And of course link building is covered in the hour-a-day plan in our book.

Back to your original question, there are differences of opinion about whether oversubmitting can get you penalized by the search engines. But we would guess it can’t, because it would be very easy for someone to attempt to knock their competitors down by oversubmitting competing sites.  And we don’t think the search engines would want that to happen.

So you want to start a link building campaign? You need a good link request letter, one that’s friendly and professional, and that won’t be offensive or annoying to site owners or webmasters.

Inbound links to your website are one of the most important factors in search engine ranking algorithms today.  In our book Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day, we tell the story of how one of our link requests got into the hands of a vengeful blogger, and how his attempt to humiliate us fell flat because we wrote a “bulletproof” link letter.

Here’s a sample link building letter that you can adapt to your own needs:

Dear Ms. Alphabeth, [always use the person’s real name if you have it],

I’ve greatly enjoyed looking through your pet plankton website, especially the “Plankton of the Month” photos.  I have a website on a related subject and I think it might be of interest to your readers.  It’s “Care and Feeding of Pet Plankton” on ZappyCo.com.  This page provides a detailed plankton care plan, including homemade algae snacks, tank maintenance, and even a section on how to set up a trust fund for your plankton. The page is located at http://www.zappyco.com/planktonics [use the exact URL that you want the site to link to].

I thought a good place on your site to link from would be on your “links” page, here: http://www.planktonlove.com/links [use the exact URL that you hope the site will link from].

Here is a description that you can use if you like:

ZappyCo’s Plankton Care and Feeding Tips
Recipes, tank cleaning instructions, and tips for keeping plankton pets happy.

I hope you find this link appropriate and useful.  We at ZappyCo would certainly appreciate a link from your site.  Please feel free to contact me with any questions.

Sincerely,
Harlan Zappy
Web Marketing Manager, ZappyCo
[Use your full name, title, and if possible, use an email address from the site requesting the link.]

What’s good about this letter? For starters:

• It doesn’t employ hard-selling techniques.
• It’s personal and specific. It doesn’t require any guessing or composing should the recipient want to provide a link.
• It doesn’t promise a link exchange.  If the link is appropriate and your site has high-quality content, you shouldn’t need a link exchange.

In Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day we give additional pointers on writing a bulletproof link letter and making your site more “linkable.” We also walk you through the steps of starting and maintaining a long-term successful link building campaign.  Follow these pointers and you’ll be sure to bring in those red-hot inbound links that your website needs and deserves!