For Search Engine Optimization (SEO), link-building is an important element that must be done to gain the results desired. Essentially, there are two primary categories of link marketing strategies: Artificial and Natural (organic).

Artificial or Spam Methods

Junk-directory listings, blog commenting, social bookmarking, forum posting (for purposes other than legitimately contributing), blogroll links, and some types of article marketing are all artificial methods. They are artificial because they do not serve any other purpose but to “trick” the search engines into thinking the target site is important. Whether or not these methods still work, is another question. But, in my opinion, they can all be sub-categorized as “spam methods”.

You may believe that your target site that you are trying to promote is not spam and has legitimate value, but using these link building methods are certainly spam. Why spam? When it comes to link-building and SEO, any content that is relatively useless and unoriginal information specifically posted or published repeatedly for the purpose of promoting a webpage in the search engines is, by definition,  search engine spam. All the methods mentioned above can all be described that way and are therefore spam. Again, whether or not these are technically effective is another story.

Natural (Organic) Link-Building

The Natural method is to produce high-quality, original, informative content that PEOPLE want to read or view. Once you figure out how to do that, the next step is to promote it via natural means. Rather than spamming the search engines with garbage links and crappy content, you will have to develop a reputation amongst real people via social networks such as Facebook or Twitter, or by guest posting on established blogs. Once you have enough interested people, every time you post some original content they will naturally follow it and even link to it on their sites. This will have a multiplier effect as more and more people find out about your stuff, the more natural backlinks will come your way.

It must be noted that this Natural method is not easy to do. This is why people opt for the cheap artificial methods most of the time. The reality is that most web bloggers and writers are terrible. I mean American Idol public audition — Terrible. There are few who take the time to polish their writing skills and learn to develop really useful original content. Many who are just writing for the web only for creating backlinks may be better writers than they appear to be, but because they need to churn it out so fast in order to propagate their junk articles they don’t actually try to write something good. Often, website owners and SEOs hire junk-article writers. These are especially common for English language articles written by people in foreign countries for a few dollars per article. The articles are mostly re-spun generic pieces with no originality and plenty of grammatical error. If you are trying to do the Natural method you need to avoid such low-grade writing. You will either have to learn to write well yourself, or hire professional writers who know what they are doing. The quality of the written material is of key importance to successful content that attracts the right kind of links.

The Google Effect

The main thing to remember about Artificial vs. Natural link-building is that the Natural method cannot be undone by changes in Google algorithms. For example, when Google did the infamous Panda Update, many of the artificial links and articles that were providing the juice for certain websites were rendered irrelevant; thus, the target sites they were propping up fell out of favor. However, those who had good Natural links from truly relevant websites by way of organic methods were not only unaffected but certainly benefited from the decline of the spamy sites cluttering up the SERPs. Since Natural link methods are exactly how Google envisions their perfect search engine (notwithstanding shamelessly promoting themselves; but that’s another article), they will always work and always benefit from Google algorithmic changes.

On the other hand, artificial methods are always adapting to these changes and such artificial methods eventually get demolished by Google. The  “tricks” will in the end become pointless until someone thinks of something else. And the cycle goes on. Think of all the work people did a few years ago to syndicate their duplicate articles all over the place only to find out after Panda that only the oldest version will be considered original, while the rest are (irrelevant) duplicate content. In the same time-frame, that webmaster could have been honing their writing skills and publishing unique content that was slowly drawing the attention of others who gladly link to it because it’s good! They would be riding high right now.

The bottom line is that Natural link-building is far better and long-lasting (naturally!).  Many experienced webmasters and bloggers will tell you this. What they often fail to mention is that it is painfully hard to do. As it should be, or else everybody could do it. Only those dedicated to it will succeed and even they will need a little talent and a lot of skill to make it work. The artificial methods are the “easy way”, albeit time-consuming, but they don’t last, and eventually much of the work will have to be redone with some new tactic, while the natural method thrives.

Author: Keenan Fitzgerald is a webmaster, blogger and all around nice guy. He is the owner of Core Web Solutions and administrator of this blog.

For the SEO aficionado, there are five regular chores that need to be done daily to help keep your site on top.

Here they are as follows:

1. You need to start off by managing your links. This involves checking that none of your current links are not working, and you ought to also check if there are any websites with backlinks to you that you were unaware of. If your site consists of a substantial number of links you will need to make sure they aren’t getting ridiculous and out of control and clear out anything that is no longer related. Also make sure that your links are suitably

All website owners should take notice. Allowing your website to go dormant is a sure way to render your website useless. Many clients I have worked with allow this to happen by simply doing nothing to update or grow their website for years at a time. There’s seems to be a misguided idea that a business can design and launch a basic commercial website and then do nothing with it and expect positive results. The Internet does not work like that, and failing to promote, develop, improve or simply update one’s website leads to a obscure website and wasted time and money, not to mention lost opportunity costs.

Why do people let this happen?

It could be for many reasons, but in my experience the most common reason is plain old ignorance. While its true that tight budgets and limited marketing capital are often excuses, if people really knew what they were missing they would find the money and pay for professional services to promote and develop their website.

As of this writing, November 2011, the Internet suffers from TMI syndrome; “Too much information”. Don’t get me wrong, the abundance of information is mostly good. For example, wherever my mind may wander I can quickly jump on the Internet and search for the answer to such mind-boggling questions such as, “Who is Harry Nilsson”, “what is the periodic symbol for Gold”, “how to make peanut butter cookies”.

If you are like me, you hate blog spam. As your blog becomes more popular this annoying phenomena only increases in frequency and intensity (both the spam and your aggravation level). There are many anti-blogspam solutions available for your blog software that can help. I recommend Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress. It can really cut down on the automated bot submissions that are just abusing blogs all day long.

However, as with any software, the people who proliferate the Internet with their garbage are always finding ways to defeat the defensive measures employed by blog owners. And the spam goes on.

So, I have conceived of a solution that is so radical, so explosive, so… simple… that I hurt my shoulder trying to pat myself on the back. Before I reveal the idea (you can just skip ahead if you can’t wait), I want to explain the main reason that this blog spam exists in the first place.

Why do you get this crap? The simple answer is SEO. Search Engine Optimization is the art and science of improving a website’s rankings in the major search engines. SEO is a very good thing for website owners to do and is essential in today’s Internet market place. However, as with anything in life, there are always cheaters. Those who find a technique that helps their SEO efforts and then they find a way to automate it and abuse the hell out of it. Thus is the foundation of blog spam.

Years ago those who deal in SEO discovered a neat trick. By leaving comments on blogs with links back to whatever URL you put in the form, you could acquire oodles of oneway backlinks. WordPress by default comes with a URL field in the comment form that allows people to post their website address (URL) with their comment and it automatically links the URL to the name given in the name field. So the evil geniuses wrote programs which allow one to comment repeatedly and thus create tons of backlinks. With a few clicks of the mouse one could post hundreds or thousands of blog comments.

Well, like any aggressive SEO method, the big search engines such as Google saw this as illegitamate and deemed it as spam. Its potential SEO value greatly diminished. But the genie is out of the bottle and every shameless SEO continues to employ this technique to this day. Their goal: to get as many backlinks for their website as possible.

Now that you understand why this occurs, you will understand my drastic solution.

The Solution

SOLUTION: Delete the URL field from the comment form. Amazing! Incredible! Genius!

The main reason these fools continuously submit spammy comments is to get their URL (link) on your blog. If you remove the field, whammo… purpose eliminated. Of course they can still put links in the comment text, but most anti-spam software discards that all day long. So it is not very appealing to the spammer.

Additionally, this will cause problems for bots which auto-submit to your blog. A field is missing and their input will break. The auto-bots will get errors and move on to other places.

For some sites this may not be feasible because the URL field in the comment form is important to you. Well then, this ain’t for you then.

How to Remove the URL field from your WordPress comment form:

1. In your wordpress admin dashboard click on Appearance/ Editor.

2. Select Comments.php from the list of files on the right side.

3. Find the line of code

and DELETE it!
4. Save your changes. Done.

NOTE: This file is theme-based, so your theme may have slightly different code here. If you are smart, you will find the right thing. Also, you must do this for every theme you have sitting in your theme folder not just the active one, especially the default theme and Twenty Ten which come with WordPress. Spammers will use the paths to the default themes to bypass your changes to your own theme. You could just delete all those themes anyway if you are not using them

One last caveat… it doesn’t do anything about pingback comments with the URL. But those are less frequent and they represent a backlink for you anyway, so not a big deal.

This can also be done by FTP and direct file editing if you are so inclined. If you are a wordpress.com user, sorry… this won’t work.

Sounds strange doesn’t it? “keep a website out of the search engines”?? Why would anyone want to do that? Well there may be several reasons. For example, the site is in development and you don’t want it indexed before its ready to be indexed. Maybe you have a private member site that is for a small group like your family or church group and you don’t want it showing up all over Google. There could be a number of reasons you would want to do this. Well the good news is, you can — and its easy!

Important: It makes a difference if your site is already indexed in Google or Yahoo or where ever.

Method 1 - For a brand new website that has never been indexed at all…
1. First check to make sure it really hasn’t been indexed. You may think to yourself, “I just bought this and set it up on the hosting yesterday, it can’t be indexed already!”. But you’d be surprised how fast it can get picked up these days. Make sure it is NOT indexed at all! (in Google type “site:yourdomain.com” — without any quotes and change the domain to your domain. You should see a message

“Your search – site:yourdomain.com – did not match any documents.”

This is good, you may proceed to step 2. If it shows some indexed pages and not that message above, move to Method 2 below.

2. Create a robot.txt file with the following code:
# go away
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

3. Upload to the root of your website. DONE!

Now if Google, Yahoo, Bing or any other legitimate search agent tries to get it, it will be rejected right at the gate.

Method 2 - If your site is already indexed you must NOT put that robot.txt file there. “Why?” you ask. Because if its already indexed, the search engines cannot learn to de-index it because they cannot get in. Your existing indexed pages will remain indexed. So if your pages are showing up in the search results do the following:
1. Remove any robot.txt file (for now, you can put it back later when its all clear)
2. Add the following meta-tag to every page on the site… EVERY PAGE! <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow” />
3. Upload all pages to the live server and you are done.

Now you can just wait it out. It may take a few weeks for the search engines to catch on. If your site was in existence for some time and there were a large amount of pages, it will take quite a while to remove it all. For removing a dead site out of existence, see my article How to Remove an Entire Website from the Internet

Another step you can use if you have Google Webmaster Tools account is to “remove URL” feature. In Google Webmaster Tools under the domain you are working with select Site Configuration>> Crawler Access >> Remove URL (tab). If you can get your hands on that, it will remove the site from Google pretty quick. You have to have verified ownership of the account, so don’t try this with your competitors website, it won’t work. However, this will not remove it from other Search Engines like Yahoo. For that you will have to wait for the noindex, nofollow tag to take effect.

Also note that bad bots (naughty evil search agents) will still ignore these directives and follow and index all the day long. So this works to get your site out of the important nice search engines, not the naughty ones.

Here’s is a another successful website launch and a beautiful site to boot! The theme we had to go on was exotic fishing, yet it needed to be different than just another fishing trips company. We created an original Flash header and neat little header graphics. All in all the client was very happy and has continued with Core Web Solutions in additional projects. Aztec Fishing Tours provides high-class fishing vacations to Mexico. Clients enjoy a weeks worth of fishing at a first class fishing camp at Lake Huites or Lake Mateos in Mexico.

Client JEM Enterprises began an SEO campaign back in August of this year. The site is already showing signs of success with some top 5 rankings in the SERPs. JEM Enterprises specializes in injection mold design. Additional areas of expertise include 3D solid modeling, mold surfacing, mold flow analysis, and plastic mold design. JEM Enterprises is operated out of the Detroit area in Michigan, USA. 

Wet-A-Line Tours has signed on with Core Web Solutions for our excellent SEO services. The company features luxury fishing trips and eco-tourism to Brazil and Mexico. They have been in business for over twenty years and are striving to be the top seat in all the major search engines for terms such as Amazon Peacock bass, Mexico largemouth bass and other terms that describe their business. So far so good as in just a few weeks and with a little professional site optimization wetaline.com have crept up to capture a number of top ten spots on Google and Yahoo.
Find out more of how Core Web Solutions can help your achieve excellent SEO results!   

Well, its been an ‘indoor’ adventure working on the SEO for Travel4Trophies.com. So far, we have been able to break the top 100 for several keywords, but this site is proving to be harder than we could realize. I am working on the links campaign currently, but the SEs are not picking them up very well. Time to go full tilt and bring out the big guns. We’ll check back on this one in about a month.

Travel4Trophies.com Offers hunting outfitter and guide information for hunting and fishing. Information on Alaska bear hunting, Alaska Caribou hunting, Alaska Moose Hunting, South Dakota Hunting, deer and elk hunting in Montana, Texas deer,Canada hunting and much more.