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The second type of link is the two-way link or otherwise known as a reciprocal link. In SEO this is done through formal communication with the webmaster of a website of your choice and asking such webmaster if both of you can enter into an agreement that you will create a link to the webmasters website and he or she will reciprocate by incorporating a link from his or her website to your website. But because of the susceptibility to of this type of link to abuse or over use Google and other search engines do not give much importance to this type of link.  Although linking is an essential part of your website in terms of usability and web visibility through SEO it is important to know their different types as there are types that are more relevant or helpful to your SEO campaign as compared to other types of links.

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But Do You Actually?

Case in point: My beloved and most beautiful partner (because she might read this) runs a small independent film review website, where she takes on Hollywood actors, tears them down, slaps them about a little, and gives her honest opinion on their performances and the films as a whole.

She hasn’t posted much, but what she has written has been good, solid content with general good use of keywords, which are in this case actors’ names, film titles, and directors, etc.

Today I was having a look at her site to see if there were any new reviews to read

I shall not lie to my readers

Today I was having a look at my inbound links and noticed a PR2 referral coming in from ForgottenFilm, I thought that was a little strange, and probably a mistake – so I went to the site to investigate further. But no, no mistake had taken place accoring to my trusty Firefox plugins.

So, I decided that she must have some how obtained a rather superb link somewhere and I was determined to help her get some more poach the link location and crowbar in some of my own sites.

First I ran a LinkDiagnosis on the site, and this is what I got:

This is what I like to call “fucking nothing”. Nada.

I found a couple of PR-Nothing forum links, and a couple of utterly useless PR0 links from an old crap wordpress.com blog that I’ve had for ages. To clarify, she has a total of 5 inbound links, none of them with any PageRank.

Thinking that this was strange I delved into Yahoo! Site Explorer

Once again, a nice healthy dose of NOTHING.

Same links, no page rank.

So friends, foes, and family alike  – after all our collective whinging about how PR is obtained, how is it that a site with no links and an alexa rank of near 15million is able to grab a PR2 after less than 6 months of existance?

I mean I’d love to start sprouting conspiracy theories to do with Google’s new quality rating system and say that because the writing on her blog is of such high quality, she has benefitted from it. But I don’t honestly think that’s the case.

So what is it?

I’m stumped on this one, so give me a kick in the comments and tell me whats going on.

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This is a good day for EggRage, and for a good reason – on July 13th of this year I posted an article about how to get into DMoz, to date it has been one of the most successful posts on this blog and has received more comments than any other article which I’ve written here.

Today, September 1st, 2008 – I logged into the Digital Designer Forum mentioned previously in my post about how to SEO a forum, to find that in a thread about submitting your site to DMoz, a new user named Eric-the-Bun had posted a rather lengthy reply to a thread linking to my original article about submitting your site to DMoz. His comments, weaved into my original post were as follows: (identified by block quotes)

How To: Submit Your Site To DMoz

Submitting a site to DMoz has long been known as one of the ”things to do” when it comes to SEO. Putting it into practice however, is something that’s often more easily said than done. People who get their sites accepted have long praised the DMoz editors, while those who have been denied entry through the pearly gates curse the editors as if they’ve done the earth some sinful injustice.

The Opening Directory project (DMoz) is very secretive in it’s nature and as such some really ‘good’ sites are often refused and no one understands why (which often leads to anger/fury/suicidal tendencies).

Usually they are waiting to be reviewed (unless of course they are not really good or are sites that won’t be accepted.

Ok let’s look at the facts. About 5000 active editors and nearly 500,000 categories – however many editors only have privileges to edit in a few categories. A rule of thumb is that there are probably about 500 editors who can edit in all categories or widely enough to count(eg UK-wide). So 1 editor has a nominal 1000 categories – how quickly do you think they will get through them? Well it depends on the area and how many suggestions they get. UK/County/little_village probably gets zero a year whilst each shopping sub-category will get hundreds.

It can take from ten minutes to 2 weeks to review a site and editors are volunteers. This means when I come home from work, I see if I have the time and inclination to spare to do some editing. Generally I manage something most days most weeks – I think my average this year is adding 20 sites a week – I also spend as much time on maintenance (correcting errors, removing dead-links, moving misplaced sites, etc) and learning about things that I need to know to edit properly.

There is no short cut to get listed because either an editor is limited to a few categories and will list your site within a few months (yes there are people who join just to list their sites and don’t do much else) or they are trusted enough to gain wider permissions and are rather fanatical about preserving their trusted status.

Well today hopefully I’ll be able to enlighten you a little as to how the whole process works, and how you can improve your chances of being accepted!

Lets begin at the beginning (vaguely); DMoz is in place to group together excellent and highly relevant websites into very specific categories. It got so popular because Google started taking data directly from DMoz and using it it’s SERPS. Google did this because of the very high quality that DMoz became known for.

DMoz is moderated by thousands of editors, who each have a category which they govern, as each category has a different editor you may find that some categories are much stricter than others, and as such: harder to get into!

In general, the guidelines prevent this. Some categories are maintained better than others and are thus quicker to get into (geologically speaking). Different categories have different guidelines for acceptance and in some cases the expected category does not exist. A case in point is real estate where due to the huge amount of spam, extremely strict rules are applied.

Let’s Get Started

So, the first thing to do is search DMoz for your site,

Good advice – leave the http://www. off the site name else the search won’t find it. Note the search works on the RDF dump which is issued once a week (ish) so can be out of date.

it’s quite possible that if you have a great site then one of the editors may have already picked it up. Failing that, you need to find the best category to submit your site to, the best way to do this is to search DMoz for your most relevant keyword, IE your primary group of products and services. Typically, this will land you straight where you need to be, but it could also present you with a top level category, with a list of more specific categories linked at the top of the page.

Selecting Your Category

The higher up the directory you go, the more traffic the pages get and the higher page rank; but lower down (and more specific) categories have fewer sites, and as such less competition for the user click-through rates. In addition, the more specific the category you choose, (generally) the higher your chances of being accepted. DMoz has been around for a long time, and the top level categories have been stuffed pretty full (which is part of the reason the more specific categories were created), as a result, it’s unlikely that any site will get into one of the top level categories unless it’s something really special.

To get the highest rate of success, submit to the most specific category that your site fits into – and bare in mind that local listings are often a lot more friendly to than commercial ones! One of the best things that you can do is submit to a local category first, and after being accepted try your luck at a generic category.

Good advice here and I’ll add some more.

Sort out the 1,2 or 3 places you are eligible for and suggest them in one go.

If you have an actual premises where people can expect to contact you (I think it is now the law for UK sites to list it) pick the correct locality in Regional and the best category e.g.
http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/West_Sussex/Worthing/Business_and_Economy/Computers_and_Internet/

Then determine what your site is about – the topic – as you can also suggest your site to a category under its topic if the site has a wider audience than local (i.e. a site for a pub, a lplumber, a tailor, is likely only to be listed in regional).

Lets take web design as an example (for no apparant reason). You can check the categories in http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_ … velopment/ for web design companies and see where you may fit. Let us say you are a company that is basically a vehicle for a free-lancer who is also employed elsewhere. It might go in to
http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Designers/Freelance/L/

Now if the site is UK based, another place to look is http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/Uni … velopment/ and
http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/Business_and_Economy/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Designers/L/ might be an appropriate place.

Of course an editor placing the sites would be making his best guess at the appropriate place (they can’t be knowledgeable on all things) which is why the update url link is there.

For most sites the rule is to suggest once to location (if any) and once to topic (if eligible). UK sites are special as you can also suggest to a topical category under http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom if the site is eligible.

So you can suggest to 2 or 3 categories as described above if the site is eligible.

The Submission Screen

This is the place that will essentially make or break your site, so be very very cautious here! Here are the fields for you to consider (assuming that you mange to get your url right):

Title, Description, and Email Address – sounds simple doesn’t it? Let’s tackle them one by one.

Title
Let’s not get fancy, if your company’s name is BlueShirt and sells all sorts of designer clothes and accessories. Then your title should be ‘BlueShirt’ – the furthest that you could stretch would be ‘BlueShirt Clothing’ but absolutely not any further than that. Keep it simple and spam free.

If suggesting to Business, the title must be the company name no matter how irrelevant. Bear in mind if the category is (say) Web Designers, the type of sites within that category is already defined.
If suggesting elsewhere, the editors look for a meaningful combination of title and description. Using the website title is OK – the editor might not agree and may change it, but at least you have indicated your preference.

Description
Again, keep it simple, but this time you have a little more room to work with. The best thing which you can do here is study the other listings in the category which you are submitting to, and try to work to those guidelines as that is clearly what the editor is looking for. A good basic template to work from is

“BlueShirt Clothing – Offers a range of designer clothing products inluding, shirts, skirts, and sunglasses. Online store and free delivery on all orders, based in Brighton, East Sussex.”

Let’s break that down a bit further, ‘offers’ is pretty much a DMoz standard, it appears right beside your title so gramatically it makes sense. I’ve then listed the primary product type, and three of the primary products. In the next sentence I’ve described the site in two words, and offered a hook (or added bonus), and finally, I’ve said where the business is based, another DMoz frequent.

More or less spot on.

Descriptions will vary depending on the category. Editors read the title and description hoping it will tell them enough about the site before they enter it, so that we are confident it is in the right place and worth listing. Very few titles and descriptions survive intact.

First sentence should be who/what the site is about, second sentence what is on the site.

Remember it is not an advert, aim for dull.

Email Address
Doesn’t matter whether you’re an SEO company or a family friend, always enter yourname@yourdomain.com where yourdomain.com is the url of the site being submitted.

Please make sure it is valid and, if using someone elses, let them know you suggested the site. If you are an SEO firm one of the worst things you can do is suggest a site with such an addresss. One SEO firm shotgun blasted an area of categories I looked after in such a way every couple of weeks. After getting a ‘?’ from the supposed suggestors, I worked out what was happening and emailed every site saying that if they had paid firm x for SEO ask for ther money back.

There are all sorts of myths about us liking/not liking suggestions from this or that type of firm/person. I personally look out for sites suggested by a number of seo and website firms because they make good suggestions. Others I look out for because they don’t. The only way I treat them differently is that for the first, I might ‘do another on before bed’ and for the second not.

Assuming you can manage the image verification that comes next, that’s it!

Final Things To Consider

This is where a lot of people trip up, so you’ve found a category, and submitted your site – what about whether or not your site is worthy to be included?

Check out http://www.dmoz.org/guidelines/ – most of it is there.

The other place to look (albeit a bit painful) are the category descriptions. Start at the top of the section you think you belong to (eg Business) and the description will identify the sorts of sites that belong there and any vagaries the area might have. You can work downwards to see if there are any refinements but usually after a few levels down, you might find it more productive working upwards.

Well, DMoz is quite secretive (isn’t everyone these days?) about exactly what it looks for, but I can tell you a few things from experience. First and foremost, do you have an address and telephone number that is easy to find, you need both those to be accepted (fact). Other than that, there are a couple of other things that may help you, but they aren’t written in stone. First of all, how usable is your site? Is the navigation simple and easy to get around, and is the content concise and well written? Finally, do you think your site deserves to be included in the category which you have selected (before you say yes..) does it stand out from the other sites which are listed? Is it any better than the other listed sites? Is there a reason that users would buy something from you rather than one of the other sites?

Bare in mind that if you DO get accepted, Google may well replace your indexed Title and Description for your homepage with the content of your DMoz Title and Description, if you want to stop this from happening to use your own homepage title and description, simply add the following meta tag to the head of your index file.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp” />

If you can come up with the answers to all the above questions and have done the submission process well, then you’ve got a good chance of being included. So all that remains for me to do is say good luck!

And don’t get downhearted if you don’t get in the first time, sadly editors will rarely email and tell you why, so keep trying every couple of months, amending your site and submission details as necessary.

And you were doing so well up til now
Please don’t. Your suggestion is there waiting for some editor to come along and review it (unless you suggested before the Great Crash of October 2006 when all the suggestions were lost, in which case suggest again). I’ve reviewed suggestions that were 5 years old and with the most appalling rubbish in the titles and description.

As an editor my role is to develop useful categories. To do that I need to look for suitable sites to add and can look anywhere I like – newspapers, vans, shop fronts, search engines, under the bridle of a yak in Nepal, etc. One of the places I can look is in the suggestion pool for the category. When an editor goes to develop a category, then, in most cases, all suggestons are gratefully received. Often a category will lie neglected for a long (geological) time and then have a burst of activity with all outstanding suggestions cleared.

In some categories the suggestion pool is a cesspit of spam, dread and loathing that few but the most hardy would venture into – well not quite. However in some places the ratio of good sites to poor Made for advertising sites is not very high and it is easier to find sites for yourself than relying on fishing in the pool.

This year I have listed ?600 sites of which less than 100 were suggested.

regards

PS in case your feel that DMOZ editors don’t appreciate what not getting listed means, I’d like to point out that I suggested my site to Yahoo back in 2005 and am still not listed, despite being no 1 for my keywords in most search engines, etc

And that concludes what I’ve found to be one of the most useful posts that I’ve ever come across on a forum, it may sound silly to some people but I’m honoured that Eric took all the time and effort to respond to my article in such detail and would like to thank him once again most sincerely for doing so.

For those of you who read the last article, now you have it straight from the horse’s mouth! So go out there, behave yourselves, and make your site worthy of inclusion on the Open Directory Project.

And as always, leave a comment and let me know what you think!

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The Opening Directory project (DMoz) is very secretive in it’s nature and as such some really ‘good’ sites are often refused and no one understands why (which often leads to anger/fury/suicidal tendencies). Well today hopefully I’ll be able to enlighten you a little as to how the whole process works, and how you can improve your chances of being accepted!

Lets begin at the beginning (vaguely); DMoz is in place to group together excellent and highly relevant websites into very specific categories. It got so popular because Google started taking data directly from DMoz and using it it’s SERPS. Google did this because of the very high quality that DMoz became known for.

DMoz is moderated by thousands of editors, who each have a category which they govern, as each category has a different editor you may find that some categories are much stricter than others, and as such: harder to get into!

Let’s Get Started

So, the first thing to do is search DMoz for your site, it’s quite possible that if you have a great site then one of the editors may have already picked it up. Failing that, you need to find the best category to submit your site to, the best way to do this is to search DMoz for your most relevant keyword, IE your primary group of products and services. Typically, this will land you straight where you need to be, but it could also present you with a top level category, with a list of more specific categories linked at the top of the page.

Selecting Your Category

The higher up the directory you go, the more traffic the pages get and the higher page rank; but lower down (and more specific) categories have fewer sites, and as such less competition for the user click-through rates. In addition, the more specific the category you choose, (generally) the higher your chances of being accepted. DMoz has been around for a long time, and the top level categories have been stuffed pretty full (which is part of the reason the more specific categories were created), as a result, it’s unlikely that any site will get into one of the top level categories unless it’s something really special.

To get the highest rate of success, submit to the most specific category that your site fits into – and bare in mind that local listings are often a lot more friendly to than commercial ones! One of the best things that you can do is submit to a local category first, and after being accepted try your luck at a generic category.

The Submission Screen

This is the place that will essentially make or break your site, so be very very cautious here! Here are the fields for you to consider (assuming that you mange to get your url right):

Title, Description, and Email Address – sounds simple doesn’t it? Let’s tackle them one by one.

Title
Let’s not get fancy, if your company’s name is BlueShirt and sells all sorts of designer clothes and accessories. Then your title should be ‘BlueShirt’ – the furthest that you could stretch would be ‘BlueShirt Clothing’ but absolutely not any further than that. Keep it simple and spam free.

Description
Again, keep it simple, but this time you have a little more room to work with. The best thing which you can do here is study the other listings in the category which you are submitting to, and try to work to those guidelines as that is clearly what the editor is looking for. A good basic template to work from is

BlueShirt Clothing – Offers a range of designer clothing products inluding, shirts, skirts, and sunglasses. Online store and free delivery on all orders, based in Brighton, East Sussex.

Let’s break that down a bit further, ‘offers’ is pretty much a DMoz standard, it appears right beside your title so gramatically it makes sense. I’ve then listed the primary product type, and three of the primary products. In the next sentence I’ve described the site in two words, and offered a hook (or added bonus), and finally, I’ve said where the business is based, another DMoz frequent.

Email Address
Doesn’t matter whether you’re an SEO company or a family friend, always enter yourname@yourdomain.com where yourdomain.com is the url of the site being submitted.

Assuming you can manage the image verification that comes next, that’s it!)

Final Things To Consider

This is where a lot of people trip up, so you’ve found a category, and submitted your site – what about whether or not your site is worthy to be included? Well, DMoz is quite secretive (isn’t everyone these days?) about exactly what it looks for, but I can tell you a few things from experience. First and foremost, do you have an address and telephone number that is easy to find, you need both those to be accepted (fact). Other than that, there are a couple of other things that may help you, but they aren’t written in stone. First of all, how usable is your site? Is the navigation simple and easy to get around, and is the content concise and well written? Finally, do you think your site deserves to be included in the category which you have selected (before you say yes..) does it stand out from the other sites which are listed? Is it any better than the other listed sites? Is there a reason that users would buy something from you rather than one of the other sites?

Bare in mind that if you DO get accepted, Google may well replace your indexed Title and Description for your homepage with the content of your DMoz Title and Description, if you want to stop this from happening to use your own homepage title and description, simply add the following meta tag to the head of your index file.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp” />

If you can come up with the answers to all the above questions and have done the submission process well, then you’ve got a good chance of being included. So all that remains for me to do is say good luck!

And don’t get downhearted if you don’t get in the first time, sadly editors will rarely email and tell you why, so keep trying every couple of months, amending your site and submission details as necessary.

Please leave me a comment and tell me of your success or frustrations with DMoz!

If you liked this article then please help out this site and Vote for us as at Favelets – all you have to do is click on the link once and you’re done!

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I’ve already talked previously about how Google page rank works and yes, this is based on linking. What I also said, (but probably not clearly enough) is that links do NOT equal positions. So many people think that in order to optimise their sites, they need to go out there an sign up to every social network imaginable and spam them to hell with links back to their site. Not only does this not help with search engines, but it hinders you with traffic, as you will become known for being ‘yet another spammer’ – causing people to ignore/block you altogether.

Having links will NOT get you positions, if you are already ranking for a key phrase based on other SEO elements, then yes PR may help you that extra little bit from Google’s point of view because you are considered to be an ‘important’ site, but again this cannot be achieved through spam links.

Where’s The Pitfall?

If you are doing the SEO, then the pitfall is that it will get you nowhere, you won’t see much benefit from it in the short run, and in the long run it may get you banned from certain sites, blacklisted, or even penalised by Google themselves depending on how extreme you get. If you are paying for the SEO, then the pitfall is that you are paying for a service that a 14yr old could accomplish, dropping links into random sites, and it still isn’t helping! Link building is NOT SEO.

What is Linkbuilding Then?

Linkbuilding is just that, building links. It should be named as no more or less than acquiring links from other sites, you should not charge or pay a premium for this service as there is no skill, knowledge, or qualification required!

But Then… What is SEO?

SEO is clean code, SEO is using the correct code, SEO is key phrase research, SEO is targeting your online marketing demographics through specific pages on your site, SEO is usability for both users AND search engines, SEO is coding and designing your website how it should have always been in the first place.

SEO does not mean tricking search engines having you rank highly.

Search engines work by looking for the best sites to rank highly.

SEO means IMPROVING your site until it’s good enough to rank highly.

More from the ‘Real SEO:’ series to follow… here

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Social Media is one of the fastest growing marketing formats in the entire world, and is miles ahead of the competition with the way it can target mass groups of specific market demographics. ‘How?’ you ask?
You have (most likely) at some point filled more information on the internet than a market research company could ever ask for, and you did it out of free will!

In case you’re still wondering…

What is Social Media?
Social media is Facebook, social media is MySpace, its Bebo, its Hi5, its Digg, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Sphinn, Slashdot, Technorati, Delicious, Reddit, Simpy, Newsvine, Furl, Spurl, MyJeeves, Google Bookmarks, and many, many more. Social media is absolutely everywhere, social media is any site where users congregate and interact with each other.

So How Does Social Media Triple Your Traffic?
Pretty easily. On a social media site; you register, you fill out your profile, and you start interacting people. The type of site that you’re on dictates the type of interaction that you have with the other site users. On Facebook for example, you create your profile and keep in touch with your friends, organise events, and share stories and photos. While on Digg you submit news articles and the rest of the community vote on them based on whether or not they are ‘news-worthy’. While finally on twitter, you post constant 150 character messages on your profile telling the world what you’re doing at that moment in time, and anybody who is interested enough to care that you are eating beans on toast yet again can tune in to your ‘twittering’.

Essentially, all these sites are ways of getting links back to your site, and not just random links, but links on pages that are already getting a high amount of traffic, so you have a higher chance of some of them clicking through to your site.

My previous post on How To Get 3,000+ Diggs in 24 hours highlighted just how powerful Digg can be, I would estimate based on experience that I generated the BBC over half a million page views based on my submission that day.

When I submitted my own article talking about how I got the 3,000 Diggs to this very site, it went mad on Stumbleupon, and I started getting 100-200 unique visitors a day. (not bad for a blog that was only 3 weeks old at the time) and so far just from that article this month I’ve generated over 1,600 visits and just under 4,000 page views.

Here are my stats for the first 10 days of March, 90% of which was down to Stumbleupon referrals.

My RSS Subscribers also jumped up by about 400% and have held pretty steadily since then. The best part is that since the large spike in traffic above, I’ve seen a consistently higher level of day to day traffic as well.

I should note in closing of this section that social media did not triple my traffic. It multiplied it by a factor of about 12.

So How Do You Get Started With Social Media?
Its quite simple really, if you don’t already have a MySpace or Facebook account, then go and get one! My personal favorites are Facebook, Stumbleupon, Digg, Delicious, and Reddit. You will notice that I have all of these in a ‘Social Bookmark This!’ link at the bottom of all of my blogs. If you want this for your blog you can download the I Love Social Bookmarking plugin for Wordpress.

Remember though, if you use social media just to spam your links, you will get nowhere. Social media sites are picky and choosey and they hate spam, so involve yourself in the community and you will reap the rewards, but you have to put in the time and the effort.

What have your experiences with social media been thus far? Got any great social media sites that I’ve missed here? Drop me a line in the comments!

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Google Page Rank is a very clever creature, it works on numerous algorithms that Google are happy to tell you about – provided you sign a contract agreeing to your instant death thereafter. A proposition that many webmasters tearing their hair out have probably considered quite seriously.
Page rank has the ability to make or break a site, good PR and it can give your indexed pages that extra bump they need to get into the top 5, and the maximum click through rate, while having poor PR can ensure that your competitors overtake you that bit more easily, and bump you down to page two; where the number of click throughs you’re likely to get is akin to the number of bikini clad supermodels you’re likely to get at the north pole.
That said however, PR is not the be all and end all of SEO, there is absolutely no point in focusing all your efforts on link building and PR campaigns if your meta content has not been optimised, or your site lacks decent content. Like anything else in the SEO world.. its just another one of the many bricks you need to lay to build your website big and strong.

From the previous article, we’ve established the basics of how page rank works, and as such I’m sure you can draw your own conclusions about how you can improve your page rank. Today, we look at how to avoid the penalties that we looked at in the last article too.

As mentioned, your PR is affected negatively if you are linking to sites of poor quality. This is not the only thing that it is affected by, but when it comes to PR penalties this is the most prominent cause.

The problem comes if you have a relatively big website, perhaps even a link directory – it becomes difficult to keep track of, and remember all the sites you link to, and check them on an ongoing basis to ensure that they are still of high quality and they haven’t slipped at all. Of course, there are dedicated content management systems that will take care of all your links and scan for reciprocal links back to you, page rank, and various other elements.. but these dedicated software solutions cost top dollar, and aren’t a generally suitable solution for the average webmaster.

Thankfully, there is a free alternative, which I discovered through SEOLand – ‘what is this free madness you speak of?!’ i hear you cry.

Read on.

The Bad-Neighborhood tool is a stunning little web application developed to solve the problem of keeping track of your outbound links. Essentially what the tool does, is scan your site for outbound links, then, when it finds them, it scans all those sites for dubious content, further outbound links, blatant spam, and keyword stuffing.

If it finds any of the elements listed above, it alerts you to where they are located, and where the link to that page is located. This way you can not only tell if you’re linking to poor quality sites, you can also tell if the sites you are linking to are linking to poor quality sites.

The results look like this

As you can see I’ve linked to flickr for one of my images (under the creative commons license) and because that page has a high density of hyperlinks in the page copy it has been marked as blog spam. You have to bare in mind that this tool uses relatively simple programming for analysing these pages, so of course it will sometimes flag up things as spam that aren’t. Use your common sense and you’ll be fine.

I find this tool an absolute joy to use, if you notice a drop in PR (in my experience) 9 times out of 10 it has something to do with one of the sites you link to, and this little tool highlights problems quickly and easily.

It should be noted however that while the tool produces good results, it does not go very deep into the site, so you may want to run the scan on you root domain, your blog, and large subcategories, etc.

Have you got a better tool? What do you think of this one?

Drop me a line in the comments!

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