I wonder why hackers hack – wasting their time, resource and energy in getting inbound links from irrelevant sites, mostly wordpress blogs. I don’t know if they have any other motive.

Whatever!!! If any hacker is reading this please understand that in the long run you guys are doing more harm than good. Here are a few reasons why you SHOULD NOT hack:

• Inbound links from irrelevant site won’t help your site get better ranks in search engines.
• In the long run all bogus links will be removed and you will get back to square one.
• The time you are wasting can be utilized for writing good content, natural link building, social networking, pay per click advertising etc.
• Don’t try to fool big search engines especially Google. If they catch, your site may get banned forever – you don’t want it, do you? They can do reverse IP tracking and can actually ban ALL the sites you own. You will loose ranking for your good sites too!
• Don’t try to fool people – they are smarter than you are. And believe me there are many who will not take a second to report abuse to your web hosting company and search engines. As you may be well aware that hacking is an offence, your web hosting company may ban your sites. Again all your sites will be down for a lot of days, until you get another host. And its easy for a new host to know why your sites got banned so,
• Unfortunately or fortunately you will have to get a new domain and start all over again.
• Usually after failing in one or two attempts, you will get frustrated, leave your black hat SEO techniques and get into the real world of “hard work” SEO.
• Ultimately you will regret your decision of being a spammer and wasting some precious years of your life.
• The time you wasted on hacking actually made the world of SEO even more competitive and so you may have to work even harder than what you had to years ago.
• Hackers cannot sleep well because in the back of their minds they carry the burden of doing all the wrong and harming innocent webmasters. Health issues – if you can’t sleep well your health is getting affected.
• Last but not the least if you are too naughty with your techniques – you may even land up in jail.

This is getting longer than I expected. But I am sure if you are a hacker and have read till here, you will be a bit more scared hacking!

So please don’t do it – for yourself, for all the hard working people like us and lastly for the great world wide web which is mostly ruled by good people.

Is there any other point I have missed out on why people should not hack?

Recommended Reading:

1. Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section
2. Computer Crimes: Hacking Never Pays

You worked really hard to make sure that you get quality inbound links to your site… and you got them. A few years down the line you felt a need to change the look of your site. You did that, and possibly changes to some navigational structure. Knowingly or unknowingly you changed name or deleted a few pages. Whack – the inbound links to those pages are now showing a 404 error – i.e. page not found.

People coming to these pages get irritated or get confused and worst of all, the link juice you got from other websites vanished too! (Search engines don’t give any credit to inbound links that point to a non-existent page.) Heck due to this your rankings have also suffered.

Good News!

Now there is a way to find the sources linking to your sites’ not found pages. If you know the website that’s linking to your non-existent page, you can take some action like mail them and ask them to link to the right page or do something to make sure that visitors do not land into an ugly looking 404 page. What’s more you can even make sure that the search engines give your site the credit for inbound links.

Google webmaster blog recently announced that you can find the sources that link to your 404 error page.

You will need a Google Webmaster account and your site should be registered.

If you don’t have a Google Webmaster account, click here to register.

Those who have can login and then go to:
 
Diagnostics >> Web crawl

Under, “Errors for URLs in Sitemaps”, click on “Not found”.

Now you should see all the sources that have linked to your 404 pages.

The “Linked From” column contains the links of all sites linking to not found pages. You can download the data CSV file if you want.

Now that you know the source, you can mail them and request them to change the link to point to the correct page,

OR

You can do something so that your 404 page looks attractive and has all relevant links.

This way neither the visitors, nor the search engines will get angry.

The best way is to create a custom 404 page if your web-server supports it. Google can help you here.

There is a JavaScript code that Google generates for 404 pages. To get it login to your Google webmaster account then go to:

Dashboard > Tools > Enhance 404 pages

This should help you to generate the JavaScript code. Just copy and paste this into your custom 404 page code.

I am sure these tips will help you to improve your sites’ inbound link quality and help you to improve rankings too.

Recommended Reading:
 
1. Free Links To Your Site - Matt Cutts offering some more information on improving inbound link quality to 404 error pages.

2. Custom 404 pages - Google help page on Custom 404 pages.

3. Make your 404 pages more useful - More info on how to generate the JavaScript code to put in your custom 404 page.

In my post on “How to Get Great Incoming Links” one of my visitors asked me some interesting questions.

I had written:

Google and many other search engines have ways to catch a paid link. If search engines find a paid link, it’s not considered as a link at all. …Since search engines don’t like paid links, you run the risk of irritating them. Guess what may happen. Its always better to avoid paid links.

To which the visitor asked me some questions (I quote):

I do NOT buy or pay for links. However, I do submit my sites to Directories because some send a large number of visitors to my sites. The problem and questions I have are:

(1) what happens if you are listed in a FREE Directory, which at a later date begins to charge a fee for listing and it keeps all of the previously listed free sites? and
(2) many free directories review sites for submission and list them at no charge, but also have a paid listing option available.

Therefore, how does Google or any search engine distinguish between those people that do not pay for links, such as me, in the two scenarios that I mentioned above?

In the later case, you might say that the search engine would assume that featured links have been paid for–however, I have had several small directories list one or more of my sites as a featured site because the liked the sites.

It is one thing to just not consider a listing from a directory, but it is another thing to downgrade a site for having paid listings, when in fact the site owner hasn’t paid for any directory listings.

I think there is a lot of confusion over paid links. For the time being forget a paid link.

Let me put it in another way:

Whatever you do to SPAM the search engine results might get your site in trouble. Paid links is one of them. You are the one who knows better. If you have bought links just to increase the link popularity and page rank of your site, your site MAY be banned.

However if you are getting your site listed in web directories its perfectly ok. But please stay away from questionable directories mainly link exchange directories. These directories list your site in exchange of a link from your site. Their main objective is to increase their link popularity and page rank. Once that happens they start selling links on their site without nofollow. This is clear spamming of the search engine results.

Directories either free or paid are known by the search engines. Well, most of them. If your site is listed in any of them, you need not worry.

However, there are a few things one should know:

Directories are of different quality. If search engines think a directory of good quality like – Dmoz, Yahoo etc., a link from them is highly appreciated (since a human has reviewed the site.)

Infact there are two benefits:

a) you get visitors from these directories
b) link popularity improves

Unfortunately there are some free directories which lists sites of all and sundry. There is no quality check, no one sees the site – they just list your site. These are the directories that are of little help.

However no worries – since they are still directories. Only thing, the link popularity will not improve.

I repeat again – if you feel a link directory is offering no value to its visitors and is spamming the search engines, its better NOT to get your site listed there.

Please understand whether paid or not – a link from a good directory is always helpful. In such a case Google is not bothered where you paid for the link or not.

In my opinion if you get your link for free, why pay? Especially if the free link sends you traffic.

A featured link is no problem at all. Most directories add “nofollow” to the href tag, so these links are not considered as incoming links.

I think people are more concerned about being banned. Rest be assured, this is the last step a search engine would take. More than paid link, if they are absolutely sure, the site owner is trying to SPAM the search engines for whatever reason – they might ban the site.

So go ahead and get your sites listed in various directories. Just make sure you are not stepping overboard and spamming the search engines.

Have you any more questions on link directory? Do let me know.

Recommended Reading:

1. How to Report Paid Links by Matt Cutts
2. How To Use Rel Nofollow For Paid Link Advertisements
3. Is Buying Links Stupid?
4. Conversation With An Idiot Link Broker by Danny Sullivan

In my earlier post “to buy link or not to buy links” I had mentioned that there is way to let the search engines know if a link is a paid link/advertisement and therefore should not be considered for ranking websites and for Page Rank (PR) juice flow.

You must do some serious research before deciding to buy paid links as a method of advertising. Make sure that the site has a lot of traffic and gets visitors who are likely to be your customers. If you advertise in a non-relevant site, you will end up throwing money down the drain. You may get some visitors but they won’t become your customers.

Buy links to advertise your site in another site only when you have done some SEO and tried pay per click methods such as Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter.

However if you have decided to buy links to your site you must link using the nofollow attribute.

Suppose your site is www.yoursite.com and the anchor text you want to use is “Buy SEO Tools”.

Here is how you must write the HTML HREF (linking) Tag:

<a href=’http://www.yoursite.com’ rel=’nofollow’>Buy SEO Tools</a>

Note rel=’nofollow’ – this attribute of the HREF tag tells the search engines:

“This is a link to www.yoursite.com but please DO NOT consider this link while ranking the target site in your search results or for Page Rank vote.”

The major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Live do understand this HTML tag.

You must be thinking – why should I use this anyway as it will block my page rank flow and affect my site’s ranking?

The problem is if you don’t use rel=nofollow the search engines will consider this as a normal link and page rank will flow and your rankings might improve. But in the near future if they find that your site does not offer good value to its visitors and you have bought links to spam results – just to get up the ladder of the SERPs (search engine results page), they might ban your site.

Why the search engines felt the need for rel=nofollow?

There are many wealthy online marketers in the world. They have plenty of money to do whatever they want. Imagine if they all made rubbish sites and bought links on high PR sites just to get better rankings?

The top results will be full of junk sites of these wealthy businessmen and soon people will lose faith in the search engine and look elsewhere. This is what the search engines don’t want. They want to show the best possible results to their searchers so that they can retain them for long.

Another problem was that many link spammers used to write junk comments in blogs (a.k.a comment spam) and leave a link to the site they were promoting. This became a problem for the bloggers and the search engines.

The bloggers spent most of their time in clearing comment spams instead of concentrating on improving their blogs. The search engine results were getting spammed too.

Here is the official bog posting of Google explaining how they have decided to prevent comment spam with the help of rel=nofollow tag.

Most of the blogging software automatically include the “nofollow” attribute in a comment. This is the reason why comment spammers have almost stopped wasting their time commenting in blogs for Page Rank.

Unfortunately this practice is still going on, though comment spam has reduced. I feel those who still do it are the ones who do not know about the “nofollow” attribute.

My blog also receives comment spam occasionally.

NOTE: Some of the blog software add rel=’external nofollow’. This is same as rel=’nofollow’, except that it means the site being linked is an external site. However rel=’nofollow’ is good enough.

What do you think? Is this a right move by the search engines?

Recommended Reading:
 
1. The official Google Blog on preventing comment spam
2. WebMasterWorld discussion on rel=nofollow attribute
3. Wikipedia explains spam in blogs
4. What is a blog