SEO Questions and Answers for My Readers - #1
By Ross Dunn, CEO, StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc.
August 2, 2006

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Two questions are answered in this article:

1. What Exactly Are Good Backlinks?
2. What are Good & Bad URLs and How to Fix the Bad Ones

Would you like your questions answered? Just email me your question, it is that simple!

What Exactly Are Good Backlinks?
Question in Response to Article: SEO Strategy for a Struggling Site on a Limited Budget

My Reply:

I agree completely with your sentiments and I hope my response sets your confusion to rest.

To answer your question I need to break it into two parts; the first covering backlinks that require reciprocal links and the second being ‘organic’ (and more powerful) backlinks that were provided naturally by site owners because they like your site.

1. Artificial Backlinks (ones that require you link back to them in return)

These backlinks must be very carefully obtained. It is important to remember that major search engines like Google will scrutinize these links the most because they appear to be links obtained versus being provided non grata. As a result you should ensure that the links you obtain are from extremely relevant sites. The “relevance” factor is usually where the confusion sets in when I am explaining this to clients so I will try to be clearer. The best way to provide clarity in this matter is to place ourselves in the position of a machine… which a spider essentially is. Always consider this question when evaluating relevance; if you were a ruthlessly logical entity would you see a clear relevance between your site and the site you are considering linking to? If the answer is clearly and undoubtedly ‘yes’ then this is a link that you should consider further. If you are unsure then you can be reasonably certain that a search engine will not be impressed with the link and you will be wasting your time attaining the link.

Considering the link further now places you in a position of evaluating the quality of the backlink site. Is it currently listed in Google and other search engines? Does the site have a decent Google PageRank? Look at the source code of the page and check within the hyperlink of other backlinks to make sure there a “no follow” tag is not present; this tag will nullify the link’s benefit. The “no follow” hyperlink tag was instituted by Google partly to allow webmasters to avoid passing on the advantage of their page rank to linked sites.

Please note, this is not to be confused with the robots “no index” tag that may appear within the header of the page or the robots.txt file; you should check these as well to ensure that the page is being indexed by Google.

2. Organic Link Building

The more organic links you obtain from relevant websites the better your site will do – without a doubt. Many find organic links the toughest to obtain but in most cases this is not true; unless their website does not inspire a person to link back to it. The fact is that many websites offer something of value that is worthy of linking to, such as, great original content or useful and compatible services/products. The key is to understand this value and pitch it in a manner that inspires positive feedback.

For example, when StepForth does link building we educate the webmasters we contact on the benefits of linking to a 9 year old SEO company with free, up-to-date and original search engine news articles. If we contacted a design firm the benefits are an increased perception that they care for their client’s online success by freely providing them with such high quality content and tutorials. We would also allow the design firm to republish the content we write in their own newsletters which would again provide more value to their clientele. Each of these benefits in turn provide additional links to StepForth without us having to provide a reciprocal link.

Also consider becoming active in online blogs, forums and newsgroups. Each of these realms is indexed by search engines and you will build more relevant links by having a link to your site within the signature of each post. Just make sure that the places you post in are relevant to your business; that should not be hard considering how many vertical discussion groups there are out there.

Further Information on Organic Link Building from the Guru: Eric Ward

In addition there are other ways to create links that can provide powerful dividends. To this I bow to the link guru, Eric Ward. Here is an excerpt from his “Content Publicity Strategic Plan” service; yes it is a mouthful but it looks like a very effective method.

A Free Link Building Tutorial:

There is an extremely detailed article on Search Engine Watch that outlines “131 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies” that I highly recommend you review if you want more information on this subject.

What Are Good and Bad URLs and How to Fix the Bad Ones.
Question in Response to Article: Demystifying Your Competitor’s Ranking Success

My Reply:

Great question and one that I get quite often; hopefully I can lay this question to rest for many of my readers. First of all you are correct, Google and many of the top search engines would not have a problem indexing the link that you provided. In fact, I can say right now that your links will be perfectly fine for all of the search engines out there that matter in the world of traffic.

For comparison purposes, here is a BAD URL:
http://www.surfboardsforyou.com/boards/
filename.php?id=F98ZF4&productId=39222&section=wicked&brand=582&template=532

This would be a BETTER URL:
http://www.surfboardsforyou.com/boards/wickedboards/39222/board532/

OR you could get away with the following URL because it only has a single variable which provides no issue for search engines to index.
http://www.surfboardsforyou.com/boards/wickedboards/39222/?prod=board532

The Tweak I Mentioned

The tweak I was speaking about is used to modify your dynamic URLs in order to make them appear static. Essentially this is a customization that needs to be done to a server to ensure that dynamic URL’s (where lots of “?&=” appear) look like static URLs. By creating static URLs you can be reasonably sure that the search engines will index your website deeper and in a quicker fashion.

• Apache Servers: Mod Rewrite
  In Apache servers and it is called Mod Rewrite. Here is a link to a search engine watch forum thread discussing this.

• Windows Servers: ISAPI Rewrites
  This is a tool especially designed for Windows IIS servers and it operates essentially the same as the Apache Mod Rewrite. More information on ISAPI Rewrite.

• Windows: .Net Rewrite
  Ok, I am no programmer or system administrator so I am getting out of my depth here but I believe this is another tool that would work for rewriting URLs for websites using .Net (this link is definitely for techies only!)

SEO Friendly URL Guidelines

Here are a couple general rules for URL’s:

1. Even with mod rewrite it is vital that you do not have too many subdirectories. If there are too many then the search engines may limit their indexing. See this video from Google Engineer Matt Cutts where he describes this very issue. As a general rule I would not have any more than 3 subdirectories within a URL.

2. Use keywords within your URLs; if you see the opportunity to create a subdirectory using a keyword related the topic of that subdirectory go for it. Just ensure not to get repetitive. i.e. /Mercedes-benz-2006/Mercedes-benz/Mercedes.php. That just looks horrible and it may not go over very well with the search engines.

3. Avoid session tagging on websites that you want to have indexed. Session tags will be applied to search engine robots just like any other person and these id’s are stop signs for search engine spiders.

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