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Official Google answers to common SEO questions

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All questions with the tag “Link Building”:

Question Views
1. Will SEO still exist in 5 years? 4,061
2. Organic link building, according to me is one of the most difficult tasks for SEOs of SMEs. Can you please list 5 effective ways of organic link building other than building great content? 3,606
3. Can you verify that Google is putting more weight on "brands" in search engine rankings? 2,481
4. What happens if I link to a good page that later becomes spammy? 1,771
5. Does PageRank flow through image links? 1,756
6. What is Google's thinking about links from article marketing, widgets, etc? 1,579
7. Do tag clouds help or hinder SEO? 1,455
8. Uncrawled URLs in search results 1,433
9. Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic and acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, Facebook to a website? 1,361
10. Some people are under the impression that blogs are good for SEO only if they're updated frequently. How much does frequency play into PageRank for blogs and other dynamic sites? 1,349
11. Is first link priority an on-page SEO factor? 1,347
12. How accurate is Google's backlink-check (link:…)? 1,346
13. Whitehat linkbait 1,322
14. Will Google consider Yahoo! Directory and BOTW as sources of paid links? 1,311
15. Does anchor text carry through all 301 redirects? 1,302
16. How would a photographer gain any significant PageRank for his or her site when the subject that really matters-images-has no anchor text? 1,298
17. How can I make sure that Google reaches and indexes pages that are on a lower (deeper) level of a website? 1,285
18. As Google's algo evolves, is it better to have exceptional links and mediocre content, or exceptional content and mediocre links? 1,257
19. Is there such a thing as building too many links, if you're following Google's webmaster guidelines exactly? 1,249
20. Are there negative SEO implications to having a blog with do-follow comments? 1,238
21. HTML sitemap vs. XML sitemap. Which one is yummy for Google search engine spider? 1,236
22. I have a client who was hacked. The SEO consultant said things were cleaned up, but they weren't correctly. All 30,000 viagra/cialis type and paid links have been removed, but no improvement in SERPs. We send reconsideration. What do we do now? 1,235
23. An SEO suggested that I take all the content on my Twitter page and auto-feed it into a section on my website. Will this really help my site's PageRank? 1,228
24. How can linking remain a major part of a search algorithm when the majority of internet users are unable to post a 'followed' link on the World Wide Web? 1,212
25. Is there a way to benefit from content scraped from your site? 1,211
26. A site for my client's competitor shows up on a SERP for keywords that never show up in the site anywhere (not even hidden in the source code). How is this even possible, and isn't this spam? 1,200
27. Regarding "nofollow" on internal links: Does it hurt? 1,197
28. Does Google value its own links for PR/Linkjuice? 1,182
29. I keep a "blogroll" page with links to all my friends' blogs on my blog. Will that affect my blog's reputation in Google? 1,181
30. How much of a difference does the number of levels in the URL make? 1,172
31. The Sitemap.xml file states there are 10,000 URLs but only 1500 have been indexed. After numerous crawls it does not appear Google is going to index these additional detail pages. What can I do to get Google to index my unique and current detail pages. 1,166
32. What are your views on 'PageRank sculpting'? 1,152
33. Is there a limit to the number of pages that Google will index from one site? 1,152
34. How can I get my business to become known online? 1,151
35. How much time is Google taking to index a new webpage, and how can we accelerate the process besides using Google Webmaster Tools? 1,148
36. Is it a good thing to put 'nofollow' in links to a disclaimer, privacy statement and other pages like that with the internal PageRank in mind? 1,141
37. As far as big brands go, why is it that they seem to do well regardless of relevance, content or links when analyzing keyword placement in search engine results pages? 1,133
38. How does Google rank sites which run on a different port than the standard port 80? 1,132
39. If I have 3 websites, is there a problem to cross link websites? 1,122
40. Now that Google can crawl JavaScript links, what is going to happen with all those paid links that were behind JavaScript code? 1,103
41. I see so many people asking "Will this increase my PageRank? 1,102
42. How can Googlebot crawl and index pages that don't have any links to them on my website? 1,097
43. Is it OK to sell links as long as we use the nofollow attribute? 1,091
44. I'm seeing Google PR for some Twitter profiles, even a PR of 4 for someone with less than 50 followers and 100 tweets, whereas for some more meaningful profiles there is no PR. Does PR of Twitter profile pages matter? 1,078
45. Does Google treat links in footer s differently than links surrounded by text (e.g. in a paragraph)? 1,072
46. Seeing as the "link:" search query is hardly ever accurate, what would your favorite/preferred way to check for inbound links be if you were a webmaster? 1,056
47. How much does the size of a web site (# indexed pages/content) have an effect on its authority in Google's eyes? 1,047
48. When you search for something, let's say "LinkedIn", you will notice there are some quick links on the search result such as "Jobs, About, Advanced" etc. How does that work? 1,041
49. Any updates on "site hierarchies display in search results" (aka breadcrumbs)? 1,037
50. If we were to syndicate my written content (entire articles) to multiple domains then would we be able to use the imminent cross-domain <link rel="canonical" tag to confirm which site we would like to index for a given piece of content? 1,037
51. Does PageRank take into account cross-browser compatibility? 1,030
52. Last year, one of my client's web servers when down for over a day. Would this have affected the site's PageRank at all? 1,026
53. Does Google crawl and treat TinyURLs using a 301 redirect the same as other links? 1,025
54. Websites lose backlinks due to other websites going out of business or closing (Geocities, AOL member pages). Does Google remove the back link juice that once came from these pages? 1,025
55. What are Google's plans for indexing the deep web? 1,019
56. If a page is disallowed by robots.txt, will a link to this page transfer/leak link juice? 1,005
57. A client has a leading competitor who has created 100 or so blog sites with little depth – Google gives them a top ranking on every related term to their industry. Why does this tactic still win? 999
58. Are nofollow links worth getting? 998
59. What are Google's thoughts on blog commenting? 997
60. If a site owner has a personal relationship with another unrelated site in a different nice and adds a link to their site from his, this link looks a LOT like a paid link. Since paid links can harm your site, what is best practice in this situation? 988
61. What are the factors that go into determining of PageRank of a Twitter page, e.g. it is the followers, backlinks? 986
62. On what basis are you increasing the PageRank for each PageRank update? 963
63. Can I use robots.txt to optimize Googlebot's crawl? 957
64. JavaScript and email addresses 955
65. What if there are external links to a URL that is not the canonical one? 948
66. What factors influence a video universal result in Google? 945
67. Google is showing breadcrumb URLs in SERPs now. Does the delimiter matter? 943
68. Will the new canonical tag help with issues where you, by accident (stupid editors linking to wrong addresses) have indexed sites by the IP address rather than hostname? 932
69. Why is Google still taking notice of DMOZ? 932
70. When you move a domain from one registrar to another or your registrant information changes very slightly (e.g. new phone number) will Google ding you for instability at the registrar? 926
71. Does Googlebot use inference when spidering – having crawled site.com/article/page1.htm and /page2.htm, can it guess at the existence of a /page3.htm and crawl it? 925
72. Sometimes when you search for a company, you won't get the main page as a search result. For example, you search for [example-company-name] and get their FAQ page listed first. How does that happen and how can we avoid it on our own websites? 923
73. We got rid of a profitable pop-under ad (since we thought the concept was user unfriendly), but then pages-per-visit and time-on-page dropped – along with our rankings. Does Google reward or penalize for a pop-under, directly or indirectly? 920
74. Do you think web search will ever make use of references (web site mentions that are not links) as a ranking signal? 918
75. What is the nofollow equivalent for JavaScript links/redirections (now that you follow those too)? 901
76. Does the new canonicalization tag make it safe to add tracking arguments to some of my internal links without fear that Google will split the quality signals between the two addresses? 895
77. If I link back to a press article about our company, will Google perceive this as a reciprocal link and therefore give less weight to the inbound link? 894
78. Is there a good way to kick off a feed in Google Reader by doing something like temporarily making the feed include a whole bunch of old content? 890
79. Are different sites treated differently? 887
80. Hidden gems of Google – Search Options 876
81. Is Google doing anything different when it comes to serving up Twitter results? 839
82. I didn't get to PubCon this year but heard that if there was at least 1 unfollowed link in a webpage, all links were considered unfollow? 832
83. Has Google changed the relevancy it awards to Social Media sites in the last six months? 818
84. When I do a Google search for my business name, Google suggests "did you mean:" with some other company name. Is there anything we can do to keep that from happening? 795
85. If you have inbound links from reputable sites but those sites do not show up in a link:webname.com search, does this mean you are not getting any 'credit' in Google's eyes for having inbound links? 180

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