Taff’s Article Directory Blog

It isn’t often you find information on the internet which you can rely on 100% as most articles are just opinions. Even “factual” articles have to be treated with a certain degree of skeptism due to an uncertainty over the validity and trustworthiness of the author.

The best and worst thing about the internet is the sheer volume of information available. Unlike a book purchased from a real bookshop where the authors credibility is 99% guaranteed, internet authors can publish what they like with virtually no controls.

Matt Cutts is amongst a rising breed of knowledge hounds using video to share his wealth of knowledge with the rest of us info seekers. Watching informative videos whilst actually looking at the person is going a long way to re-dressing the balance between Good, Suspect and Bad online information. After all, is someone who is not that sure of his subject going to sit in front of a video and then post it online for all to see?

I think not. It is one thing to anonymously write countless articles to bombard us with but a live video would be out of the question.

Matt’s blog is here http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

Taff

Just a quicky…

If you need a link checker for your website try Xenu’s Link Sleuth. Well written little program that is free.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth

Taff

 

It is unbelievable just how many “experts” are luring us into their special free giveaways which appears to be prevalent on the Net just now.

Whatever happened to the days when we subscribed to a newsletter and actually had some real expert information sent to us by a real expert who wasn’t continually begging us to buy what can only be called junk.

The flood of poorly written products in the case of e-books and the malfunctioning or just plain useless software packages shows an ominous trend towards apathy and ignorance.

Folk are being told that anyone can produce their own product in a few days, (provided you’ve bought the nominated “how-to” e-book of course), but the truth is that most people can’t. I feel that we are seeing a spate of amateurish products from people desperate to make cash and quit the day job.

Like most other things this will be a passing trend thank goodness.

Taff

Sorry about the lack of posts so far this month. No excuses but apart from setting up multiple websites, (Yes… I took advantage of the special offer from GoDaddy so I now have a gazillion domains to try and do something with - Help!), have been reasearching and sorting some of the best free information on the Net and also finding relevant blogs.

It is astounding how many so called experts are not actually practising what they preach. Just bought some info on Adsense and the owners site looks nothing like it should if they were following their own advice! This is not an isolated case…

I am sure that one day I will be writing this blog from some tropical paradise with the waves gently lapping at my feet but for now it’s off to grab a coffee and get back to business.

Bye For Now,

Taff

PS Want to buy a gazillion domain names… cheap??

Hi,

This is something I have never really considered before as link exchanges have never really produced much in the way of results for me. Here is an article I have produced on my findings…

Search Engine Friendly Web Directories Why on earth should anybody knowingly submit their valuable links to a non SEO, (Search Engine Optimized), web directory?

What Is A Search Engine Friendly Web Directory? Basically we are looking that all the links on the pages of the web directory can actually be spidered by the search engines. These pages must be able to be scanned by the SE robots so your links will be cached and assigned a page rank.

Let’s Build A Search Engine Friendly Web Directory… Redirects… It is surprising how many link exchanges / directories use redirects for the link listings. Even with a basic knowledge of SEO you know that a redirect does not count as a back link so your listing is worthless. A redirect can be used for link statistics. Also, consider that the PR formula will effectively reduce the PR of the owners link site as it is applied to outgoing links. Using a redirect will work to the benefit of the link exchange owner but against you as your links are never actually seen by a bot. So beware paying for a link to a directory with a high PR before first checking it out.You can check out the possibility of a redirected link by placing your mouse over your link and seeing if it shows your actually site or goes through a script first.

Nofollow, Noindex tags… These tags will prevent the search engine robots from spidering pages. If these tags are used on pages containing links then the link is never seen. Using these tags also prevent the link exchange site having to share its PR. 

Too Many Links On A Page… This has the effect of burying the link so it probably will not be indexed. Opinions differ in that my research produced one line of thought saying 10 links per page is optimal, another saying no more than 30… take your pick as Google probably wont tell us. To be on the safe side I have decided to limit the maximum number of links within Taff’s Search Engine Friendly Link Directory to be 8 on any one page. 

Site Maps Are Good… Let’s make it as easy as possible for the bots to crawl our links therefore a site map is a must.

Mod Rewrite… Should have this to make a dynamic, (non spiderable), link into a static, (spiderable), link. This is done at the .htaccess level.Use relevant anchor text when planning your link. Click Here is not what the search engines like to see. Use your keywords as your anchor text. I will use an internal link to my article directory as an example - why waste an opportunity? 

Matt Cutts has done a few video blogs which are definitely worth a look.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3583760678227172395 

Enjoy,

Taff