Unless you’ve had your head in the SEO sand, you know that there’s a new search engine to reckon with. It’s not really new. Bing is just MSN Live revamped in a very good way. And the new kid on the block is getting market share. Will it usurp Google’s top spot? Not likely, at least for a very long time, but you just never know. Who ever heard of Google before 1998, right?
So, Bing released a new article in its Community: Link Building for Smart Webmasters which talks about natural, organic link building. Hmm… they actually could be Google clones.
We know the right ways: article marketing, blog commenting (not spamming), press releases, yadda, yadda. But they also mention that reciprocal linking is cool… IF you’re linking to sites in your niche. Linking to sites with no relation to what you’re doing won’t help you and in some instances can actually hurt.
So, let’s focus on stuff that will cause you harm: continue reading »
Oh, you’ve seen the sites. “Just $49 and we’ll submit your site to a gazillion search engines! It’s great for SEO! It’s amazing! Give us your money!”
PFFFTTT!!!
This is just one of those bullshit services that newbies fall for.
Here’s the deal… DO NOT pay anyone for search engine listings. The robots will find you, even if you have no keywords in your title, even if you have a crappy description, even if you’ve only been online for a week. Robots will find your page and decide whether to rank it or whether to come back at all.
Want to see if the search bots have seen your page and when?
Just type your domain into the search engine and see what comes up. At Google, if you click in the “Cached” link under the description for your site, you can see your page and the date and time that Google last visited. If it was the current day or yesterday, cool! You’re updating often. If it was a month ago, you have problems, brothers and sisters. You need to add some fresh stuff to your site or you’ll never rank in the SERPs (search engine results pages) at all.
Bing also has a “Cached Page” link that you can check out, but they’re still slower than Google. Google had my page from yesterday, while Bing hadn’t been there since 11/5. You know how often I post, so…
Yahoo also has a “Cached” link, but it wasn’t working, so… I can’t comment on its frequency by using this technique.
But there is a foolproof way: You can also go into your hosting account’s c-Panel dashboard to check this out. Most have a feature called “AWStats,” which tells you quite a lot of information, including which search bots visited and how many times they came during the month and even how many times they successfully accessed your “robots.txt” file. continue reading »
