Have You Tested Your Links?

Trying to get good ranking in search engines is hard enough, but you have to maintain the effort. We are constantly told that links are the route to good rankings, as long as the links are relevant and maintained.

Your website is probably changing almost every day to keep up with your SEO efforts. You try this, tweek that, remove something or other and in the end, your initial tests on your website are no longer valid. The last thing you need now is irrelevant keywords and broken links.

With this in mind, I have been spending the past few weeks developing some online tools for you to quickly test your links (onpage and reciprocal) and keywords. These tests include;

1. Link Extractor: Evaluates the links (internal and external) on your web page, including the attributes (href, onclick, rel and target), anchor text/HTML and status (i.e. are they still active).
2. Reciprocal Link Checker: You been told that a link to your website is on a certain page? Well, how good is that link? In other words;  
• can your link be followed? (nofollow)  
• does your link have any events attached to it? (onclick)  
• does the link reference your website directly or does it follow an internal path  
• is the reciprocal page full of links and no textual value?  
• is the reciprocal page linked to from the home page of the website?  
• does the page have a theme similar to your website (keywords)
3. Keyword Analyser: You have setup your webpage, written your content and then added your META keywords. This tool allows you to compare your keywords against the content of your web page.

All the tools are currently free, so use them and let me know what you think.

Regards,
Craig

PS: This website is still undergoing development so more tools will be added as time goes by. If you can think of any other relevant tests that you would like to have available, let me know and I will see if I can get them online.

Craigs Directory - Lessons Learned

Craigs Directory has been live for about 18 months now. It started as a simple web directory that ranked websites by credits. I admit I am a "techie" person and originally built it as a challenge and maybe because I was a little bored. However, its success has taught me quite a bit over the last 18 months, some good lessons and some bad.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not a one-time deal, it is ongoing. You need to keep at it, keep tweaking and keep promoting.

Google PageRank

This is probably only important to me because most people who submit their websites to Craigs Directory are keen to increase their own Google Ranking. However, I believe PageRank is always a few months out-of-date (in the Google toolbar) and Google wants us to focus more on ROI and not on visible pagerank.

That being said, Google penalized me in October 2010 for not adhereing to their strict guidelines - by removing my visible pagerank. My search results have not changed, so I know that Google has not removed me from their indexes, but I have noticed a 25% drop in daily submissions (±200 down to ±150 per day).

I have now corrected the reason for my penalty and hope to have my visible pagerank restored, but I am not too concerned as it has not effected me too much. BTW, Google still crawls about 2,500 pages of Craigs Directory per day.

Email

Email is still a good communication tool. Through Craigs Directory I send out numerouos emails, the purpose being to keep people up to date on the rank of their website. Unfortunately, there have been times where I have had to send out emails to let people know that their website has been declined for not adhering to my submission guidelines (basically no sex, drugs or hacking content). Suffice to say, there are some people out there who take things far too personally, enough said.

Whether it be through rejection or just plain malice, there have been attempts to damage Craigs Directory or is reputation. Over the last 18 months I have had to deal with really offensive emails, hacking attempts and even having my email being black-listed by Yahoo (that battle is still ongoing).

I have learnt a lot over the last 18 months, but mostly I have learned about people. SEO is all about ranking in the search engines, but we tend to forget that it is "people" that type in the search query.

Regards,
Craig