Link building blogs dropped by Google – This Week in Blogging

by MARKO SARIC

To keep you up-to-date with blogging, here are the most important news that caught my attention this week.

Link building bloggers de-indexed

Google has been making more changes in the way they rank sites. They have gone after sites that use link building tools to game their way up the rankings.

Some bloggers choose an easy way out when creating their sites and pay for tools that automatically build thousands of links for them.

Building links means getting other sites to link to you. This is important as Google sees external links as a big factor in deciding the rankings.

Bloggers who went for these easy methods paid quiet a lot money building the links but now their sites are no longer ranking in Google. If you financially depend on your blog, having it de-indexed from Google might kill a major part of your traffic and that can be catastrophic.

I don’t mention link building much because of the reason that I don’t do it. It is not recommend to go for these easy methods. Instead grow your traffic organically: create great content, be active in social media and get links by doing some blog commenting and guest posting.

This takes more effort than automated link building but it is the best option for blog SEO in the long run.

See more: Blog SEO tips by Google’s Matt Cutts.

Use images for more engagement

Blog content that includes images gets more frequent clicks than content that is text-based. Curata measured the increased engagement at 47 percent for those articles with photos on their pages. Images not only benefit the reader experience but also give SEO lift to the sites.

“Metadata used for the image, including its title and caption, is more information for search crawlers to index.” On top of this social media sharing and interaction improves SEO, so that is an indirect SEO value of images as images increase the engagement.

See more on how to use images in your blog posts.

How to get traffic from Reddit

Reddit is one of the social media communities that can bring thousands of visitors to you. Interested in how Reddit algorithm works? Here are the details:

• Submission time is a very important parameter, generally newer stories will rank higher than older
• The first 10 upvotes count as high as the next 100. E.g. a story that has 10 upvotes and a story that has 50 upvotes will have a similar ranking
• Controversial stories that get similar amounts of upvotes and downvotes will get a low ranking compared to stories that mainly get upvotes

Learn more on how to get traffic to your blog.