Diminishing Backlinks / Social Network marketing

[Robtheblob]

I have a small(ish) ecommerce site which has been up and running for 6 months now (time is really flying by). I've followed some advice from parts of this forum and have been steadily increasing my google ranking and natural hits over the past two-three months. I am trying to do a couple of things at present and am struggling:

a) I have watched the number of backlinks listed on the webmaster tools reducing over the past 4-6 weeks? Why could this be? Should I be worried?

b) I've set up sites on a couple of additional social networking sites but don't really know the best way to find and approach possible customers. Could I have some pointers please?

[paretowasright]

Rob,

I think you should look at authority blogs and fashion review sites for your category alongside other social networking and link building activity. If you are going to have something like a facebook club it needs regular new content and you need prominent icons on your site encouraging your customers to join. The same goes for twitter.

[SEO Traffic Solutions]

Hi Rob

I wouldn't worry too much about some of your backlinks diminishing - this is just the natural cycle. Some will come back, but some wont. Which is why you need to keep up your efforts of aquiring new backlinks.

Have you tried posting some good content to web 2.0 sites like hubpages and squidoo with a keyword rich anchor text link to your site. These links will show up and will stick. From my experience, some backlinks from blog comments and forum posts often diminish after time.

[paretowasright]

Hi Rob

I wouldn't worry too much about some of your backlinks diminishing - this is just the natural cycle. Some will come back, but some wont. Which is why you need to keep up your efforts of aquiring new backlinks.

Have you tried posting some good content to web 2.0 sites like hubpages and squidoo with a keyword rich anchor text link to your site. These links will show up and will stick. From my experience, some backlinks from blog comments and forum posts often diminish after time.

I think Squidoo is 'no follow' from memory?

[SEO Traffic Solutions]

I think you are right.

I don't think these are no-follow though:

Wordpress.com
Blogspot
Tumblr
LiveJournal
Blogetery
Blogsome
ClearBlogs
Thoughts.com
Easyjournal
Blogster
BlogoWogo
Aeonity

Get some content up on these sites with a keyword rich anchor text backlink and it should help your rankings.

[OldWelshGuy]

some of them are nofollow, and I think at least 1 of them isn't accepting new accounts.

[SEO Traffic Solutions]

Thanks Welsh Guy - I will check them out again. What is your opinion on posting content on sites that are no follow? Do you think it is a waste of time?

[OldWelshGuy]

Nope, It depends what you are doing. but in the real world, people who link to websites wouldn't know what nofollow is, so, if you only build links from dofollow, then you get an un-natural link footprint, and that alone is enough to raise a google flag.

[SEO Traffic Solutions]

Good point. It wouldn't look very natural if all your links were do follow. Plus it is just Google that pays attention to the no follow tag - the other search engine don't.

[Robtheblob]

Thanks to all for your comments. Being a greenie can I ask for some definitions?

What is meant by no follow and web 2.0?

From what I gather, "no follow" would mean that Google doesn't recognise it but if I only set up links to "do follow" Google gets suspicious and my ranking diminishes, so I need to post a mixture?

I understand about posting good text and backlinks and thanks for the list of recommended sites but can you recommend how I should set the accounts up. Should I name the accounts after the website, my keywords or random names. I have had advice before suggesting the account names should be the same as my keywords. What do you think?

[SEO Traffic Solutions]

Google assigns each page on the web a rank out of 10. This rank can be passed to other pages on the web simply by linking out to it. For example, if a web page had a Google page rank of 6 and there was a link from this page to one of your pages. Then a small portion of this rank or authority would leak on to your site. This meant that people would spam just so that they could receive some page rank onto their pages. To combat this Google set up a no follow tag. When this tag is assigned to a link none of the page rank is passed.

Having a good page rank on your pages is good as this is one of the factors that Google looks at when determining where to rank your pages.

Web 2.0 is the terms given to pages on the web that allow for user generated content. For example, all the sites I listed above allow you to create an account and put some content up. The old web used to be one way, i.e. searchers would consume content they found. The new generation of the web, web 2.0 makes it easy for users to publish they're own content.

On some web 2.0 sites your profile page can actually rank in Google. Therefore it is a good idea to put a keyword in your username e.g. web20site.com/keyword1

Hope this helps.

[Robtheblob]

Google assigns each page on the web a rank out of 10. This rank can be passed to other pages on the web simply by linking out to it. For example, if a web page had a Google page rank of 6 and there was a link from this page to one of your pages. Then a small portion of this rank or authority would leak on to your site. This meant that people would spam just so that they could receive some page rank onto their pages. To combat this Google set up a no follow tag. When this tag is assigned to a link none of the page rank is passed.

Having a good page rank on your pages is good as this is one of the factors that Google looks at when determining where to rank your pages.

Web 2.0 is the terms given to pages on the web that allow for user generated content. For example, all the sites I listed above allow you to create an account and put some content up. The old web used to be one way, i.e. searchers would consume content they found. The new generation of the web, web 2.0 makes it easy for users to publish they're own content.

On some web 2.0 sites your profile page can actually rank in Google. Therefore it is a good idea to put a keyword in your username e.g. web20site.com/keyword1

Hope this helps.

It certainly does and now I can go armed to create some accounts and content!