How Penguin evaluates the link quality

Google's Penguin update is about links, namely about good and bad backlinks to your site. It will evaluate anchors of your backlinks and the quality of backlinking sites. Further it will look deeper into relations between your site and sites linking to you.

Further are some factors listed, which will help you to rethink your linking strategy and, maybe, enlighten you in purifying your link profile, so the Penguin gets no appetite for eating your site;)

Following characteristics do influence on how Penguin evaluates link profile quality of your site:

Solution for "stop spamming us. you're wasting your time" at Hacker News / Ycombinator

If you get this message on trying to post something at Hacker News / Ycombinator (not dependently of submitting method: bookmark or site form), it means, the site you try to post is flagged by any HN admin as spam. By mistake or not is another question - i know the case, when YouTube was flagged as spam there. Anyway our intention is not to dispute with HN admins whether our list is spam or not, but rather just to post a link, what we want to post. Deleting cookies doesn't help. But the working solution is simple:

How to link guest posts to get the most author trust rank

Guest blogging is a hot topic now. There is much unclear with it: some of doing guest blogging get penalized, other are up and about spreading guest posts, and do it fearless and en masse. Ok, the life keeps moving, and incoming links must be acquired, whatever comes, cause they remain one of the strongest signals for the site ranking. In the last article about guest blogging i've written about guest post markup, which helps you to create an additional trust signals in it. Shortly, reading an article from Bill Slawski about Google co-occurrence patent and keyword relationships i got an idea about utilizing of co-occurrence for guest blogging.

What are main problems with guest blogging from Google's point of view:

• guest article hasn't topically to do with the whole publishing site
• guest article author is rewarded with (highly) keyword-enriched link anchor text from the guest article to author's own site.

The topical relation's issue is the business of an author alone - only author decides, where to guest post. But what is the motivation to guest post if not the keyword-enriched anchor in the backlink? It must be any kind of threading relation from the guest post to the own site. Let us look, how to set the thread without penalty fear:

30 cheat sheats for successful SEO

What a SEO needs to know?

The web is flooded with infografics and cheat sheets. Somebody meant once, such giveaways are good for SEO as linkbuilding assets and now everybody makes some. At least as copy and share. I will not speculate about whether or how many of them bring real value, imo most of them are redundant, but my personal biggest problem with them was - THE cheat sheet was NEVER present, if it was really needed (at least for me). Indeed, the sense and the convenience of cheat sheets is if they are there just in time, at the moment, whem one needs them. So i decided to create a collection of all cheat sheets i ever used on my SEO activities and share it. This cheat sheets suite is an evergreen knowledge, hints and tricks, which will be always helpful. Surely this knowledge isn't enough to call oneself an expert, but for somebody who does SEO, specially technical SEO and Onpage SEO, these cheat sheets will render a great service. And for somebody who learns SEO at the moment, they will give a great summary of things which must be learned. These cheat sheets cover already all essential knowledge segments a SEO brings daily into action. Befor publishing i reviewed all cheat sheets to find eventuallya fresher version - for some of them i finded one indeed.

How to practice guest blogging successfully without penalty fear

There are hard times for guest bloggers and guest blogging platforms. Google's top spam officer  means, guest blogging is done. Even was penalized one of the most successful guest blogging brokers. There is a big chaos and panic in the webmarketing environment. "Guest blogging is dead" is one of the most searchable phrases. But in my opinion there is a kind of doing guest blogging, which allows the successful valuable guest blog practice. Lets look on what exactly hates Google on guest blogging, what exactly drives a guest blogger into penalty and how the common sense and semantic markup help us to spread our guest blog articles and get valuable backlinks for it without penalty fear.

How to result co-citation into valuable backlink?

What yields co-citation for SEO?

There is much stuff written about the role of co-citation for SEO. To explain co-citation briefly: if site A links to sites B and C, then Google means sites B and C are somehow related. But how SEO makes a valuable backlink Profit with co-citation?

Do you really need this backlink?

There is a very simple rule to decide, whether you really need a backlink from the given page, whether the site is worthy enough, so you will not need in the future to disavow it - and Google uses the same rule for sure.

The rule is: do you expect ANY traffic this backlink will generate? The real link value isn't a page's Page Rank, but a generated keyword-targeted traffic! If you see any site, you can decide with your common sense and without any analytic tool, whether you will get barely one single visitor from it. If common sense isn't enough, make use of free analytic tools like MajesticSEO, Open Site Explorer or the like to estimate the traffic. Try to estimate traffic not for the the main page, but for the page wherefrom you plan to get a backlink. And if not - you don't need such backlink. This rule is applicable to pages (not sites) without PR or with PR 0-1. You can assume, that pages with a hiegher PR do generate any traffic.

Imagemap creation for SEO purposes

It's not a kind of doing, what you can use on each corner. But such hint could help you to diversify and enrich your assets and to gain the spreading of your source. But don't misuse - you could be just quickly abused;) Google doesn't like if you become oversmart. I'm talking about imagemaps, the links inside of imagemaps and making use of imagemaps for SEO purposes.