Links Question

[James]

Hi Folks,

Having done my SEO homework and increased my Google placement for the search term "sunglasses" from not even listed to being in the top, er, 300 my focus has now turned to improving my Google Pagerank.

I know that having links of relevance and quality will significantly improve your pagerank and therefore placing, but what actually constitutes a link?

The reason I ask is that when you do a backlink analysis for my homepage using the very nifty Google links tool, the only link that shows up is Bluepark. This is odd because I am linked by various website for my professional bodies (all high ranking websites) and the main NHS website (ranked 7/10), as well as my suppliers' sites for when people do a dealer search.

So I'm kind of left thinking that you have to be listed on a URL that contains /links or somesuch so that those pesky little spiders can track you down, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Whilst I'm here if anyone fancies a link then PM me.

Thanks for your time,

James.

[petad]

Hi James

From your post it's clear you know what a link is, as you seem to be placed on some useful sites. What might be happening is these pages have a "nofollow" HTML attribute, which means the spider does not follow the link, or index it (or in some cases follows it, but does not index). Have a look at the Wikipediia entry for it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

I think if you look at the source code for the relevant page with your link on, if it has "rel="nofollow" then it will suffer from this problem.

If that's not the case, it may just not be showing up yet. I have dozens of links that don't show in the Google links yet. How long have you had the links?

Regards

Pete

[James]

Thanks Pete,

Another thought occurred to me is that my address is not sitting there amongst a load of HTML just waiting for a spider to happen across it. You actually have to search through a database (which is probably held on some back-office server) to get my address and thus can't be indexed or logged by Google.

The website has been up for about 7 years now (3 with Bluepark) so I really should be doing better than a lowly 2/10.

Back to the drawing board...

James.

[WhiteRabbit]

Hi James,

Google tends to not be very accurate when it comes to reporting backlinks - it's been a while since I checked but Yahoo used to report significantly more links than Google did, so give that a shot.

I have to say that online PR (press releases not pagerank) is a very valuable way of getting more links - downside is it can be expensive. It can also be cheap but it takes a fair bit of wading to find the cheap or free links that are worth doing.

Check out:
Freepressreleases.co.uk
PR Zoom
Free-press-release.com

They tend to be the top of the free crop!

Having had a quick look at your site, I'd recommend using different body text for each of your brand category pages rather than the same text that appears on the /sunglasses.html page. Write about the brand and that will definitely help - it's possible that Google isn't ranking you as highly due to the repetition of text.

Also you could optimise more heavily using the meta description for the brand pages - they also seem to use sitewide text rather than brand specific text.

Hope this helps!

Giles

[James]

Hi Giles,

Thanks for taking the time to look at that for me. You're a star!

Regards,

James.

[Robin]

Check what links Google web master tools think you have too. By using back links info from my home page on the google toolbar I have two backward links. However according to web master tools I have over 800 !
Any clues why this is so different??

[Dave]

The backlinks button on the Google Toolbar can not be trusted and does not return correct information. As Robin says use Google Webmaster Tools