I have started to submit to directories and also to do yahoo answers. I am currently submitting to 25 directories per day because I heard that too many at once can be viewed as link spam. Should I limit my yahoo answers as well and if I should then what amount? Also does my 25 directories per day seem like an OK number or would it be too low or high?
There's no such thing as "too much". At worst, they'll just be devalued a bit until time catches up to your site.
I think it is very possible. I have read posts about users that use a tool to submit links to FFA's and blogs. Many people say that they see great results in their SERPS within the first couple days then a dramatic decline after that. I think that Google/Yahoo are wising up to these techniques and if they see a large number of backlinks suddenly appear then they peanilize your site.
It is not recommended to add too many links all at once. What Google monitors is unusual activity, so for example if they find new links to your site at a rate of one link per day, and this for the past 12 months; now suddenly they see 50 links per day; this is spotted as unusual. Penalties have occurred in the past as this looks so much like either link buying or link spamming. So best advice is to always do that smoothly. No need to rush like a mad dog.
You guys don't understand how that works. You are not penalized for other site linking to you. Only the links themselves are. Otherwise no one would be ranking because we'd all be getting our competitors knocked off!
oh, we dont understand but you do. lol anyway if your site gets penalized or the links to your site gets penalized, this is exactly the same; plus you do not know that. what we know if that when Google sends a penalty to an url, the url drops in serps. end of story. of course the competitors dont drop as well. say if google gives you a penalty -50, you cannot be in top 50 anymore; so someone else will.
Usually you won't get penalized just for getting a lot of links. More often you get penalized for getting too many links with the exact same link anchor text. This look extremely spammy to Google. Your link anchor text would vary a lot if those links were coming naturally. Despite what Random Guy thinks, you can get penalized for external links. This type of penalty seems to only affect the particular overoptimized keyword. The reason people aren't attacking competitors like this is because it may end up helping your competitor if they balance out their link anchor text distribution afterwards.
1. Amount of links Getting too many links too quickly may caused a new site to be sandboxed. So Keep Link-Building Slow and Steady See for instance http://www.seomoz.org/article/sandbox-solutions Just an additional point: validation time lags of directories vary from a few hours to several weeks or even more than 1 year (DMOZ) 2. Too many links with the exact same link anchor text. (see above)This is related to the duplicate content theory 3. quality of links You focus on quantity, but quality is much more important. General directories are just a first step in your link building. As a second step, try to get links from related sites (same theme).
My thoughts are a bit different on this... get a zillion links as fast as possible.. go to the sandbox for a while... get more links... after a while you will have many zillions of links and you will be out of the sandbox. Thant may take some time but you'll have a boatload of links be out of the sandbox and have a good PR.
I was genuinely answering Yahoo Answers about a variety of subjects a couple of years ago - and about 1-2 times a week I'd answer one where the answer was given on my website ... and I was banned. So don't rely on those. The annoying thing is Yahoo is littered with people promoting all manner of "get paid to" spam and yet there I was, minding my own business, providing good content and answers and somebody took an axe to my account. Barstewards! (P.S. I also got my wordpress account shut down as I didn't realise I was breaking their TOS ... and missed the emails they sent me)... oops After those it kind of put me off any linking and it's only now something I am thinking about building a strategy for.
Hmmm the reason I started looking at yahoo answers is because I saw some yahoo answer links show up in my Google webmaster tools links section. Man I honestly do not know what to do now. Sounds like my 25 directory submissions per day could be too many. <sigh> So much conflicting information on the net. But honestly I think I am going to stick with 25 per day. With the list I have this could keep me busy for months.
It is quite normal. There are some google guidelines and some basic SEO practices. But you may find many SERPs with top-positioned sites which do not at all conform to google guidelines and SEO standards. It is so in each industry. Also on stock exchanges, you have investors called "Contrarians" who just do what all the others do not do. Sometimes quite succesfully. Anyway, be sure that quality links is terribly much more important than links quantity, both in terms of PR and SERP position.
If you knew what kind of success I was having you would say "I would like for you to share more" instead of your sarcasm.
I don't think so. You probably will not be accepted on all directories, and they will not accept your submission at the same time. And the pages where your link is placed will not be indexed by Google at the same time too. However you need to vary your anchoer texts. You will also need to combine it with other link building methods, forum sigs, blog commenting, article marketing, bookmarking, and so on. Again, vary your anchor texts.
Link building has to be seen as appearing naturally. Just think of all the things that Google has at its disposal when determining what's taking place with a website - something that I refer to as universal search indicators. With things like YouTube, Google Analytics, Google ToolBar, Google News, GMAIL, FeedBurner etc, Google has an enormous amount of data at its disposal. If it has noted that there are 50 links showing up to a site in a single day, yet historically it tracks only 10 visitors a day to that site, maybe it just says "Hmmmmmmmmm, that's odd" and then takes a closer link at the link building that has occurred, assigns a penalty and voila .. SERPs drop. Yes, Google does know that SEO occurs and that people do build links, but the method, number and frequency of obtaining links do come into play. I see nothing wrong with doing 25 directory submissions a day, especially if they are done manually.
Keep in mind that submitting to web directories doesn't mean that your site will be accepted in every one of them so you would have to look at your average acceptance rate. It could be as low as 15-25%. Also your submissions aren't going to be approved all at once. Depending on the directory, it could take days or weeks before a site is even reviewed so I think your actual link count would be more of a trickle than a flood.