SEO Tips (Part 7) - Log Link Matching
Introduction
I would like to thank Blue Hat SEO for this excellent SEO technique. Before we begin I invite you to check out the rest of my SEO Tips segments. I am going to give me simplified version of this technique, but read a more detailed explanation at Blue Hat Seo. The reason I enjoy reading Blue Hat so much is because he gives advanced SEO techniques that very few people know about, and just as the name entails I believe Blue Hat is a mixture of black and white SEO hat techniques. Anyways enough talk let’s start with the SEO tip.
Objective
Let’s start with a description of what our objective is. Google can only index pages that have a link to it, from another page that has already been indexed. Logically, it can’t find what it can’t see. Knowing this let’s say for example there are 100 web pages that link to yours, and Google only knows about 80% of them. This means that there are 20 pages giving your website link-love that don’t get counted by Google. What we are going to do is give those web pages some life (get them indexed) and then our dormant links wake up and give us some credit.
How-To
Check your log files for your referrers list. This will tell you who has linked to your website without having to rely on Google’s ’site:’ operator. So after we have the list, we want to get these sites indexed. There are a few ways to do this but I have found pingoat.com is the best. Pingoat will ping all major RSS and blog services with your address, and it will get indexed. Now that these previously useless links to us have been brought to life, we will get much more Google love.
Twitter Me!
Why does Yahoo pick up so many links (including nofollow tags), while Google only picks up a very small amount regardless of the quality of the links?
I’ve seen Google not pick up a Yahoo directory listing as well as 2 DMOZ listings for a one of my client’s sites. I found this very odd. Does Google just list links in their “link:” command based on what is indexed or is there a popularity score for each link, which is the only reason they are listed in the “link:” results?
My thoughts are different algorithms, they are just reading the links differently and not counting some.
Thanks for the comment!
There has never been an obvious set of criteria for which links Google shows when you use the “link:” command. As far as I can tell they have been reducing the number of links shown using the Google Toolbar and the “link:” command.
But they now let you see a much more complete list of backlinks using Webmaster Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters/). This will also tell you other stuff about their evaluation of your IBLs.
You have to register your site at Webmaster Tools in order to get the full information.
You’ve probably also noticed that MSN disabled the “link:” information three or four months ago.
yes webmaster tools is nice. i wish i had the complete list of sites linking to me. yahoo does an ok job.
thanks for the comment
matt