Gone are the days when you could rank high in Google and other major search engines with loads of directory submissions and article marketing. During early times, blog comments provided valuable back-links and made life easy for the SEO folks to improve the page rank and overall performance of the site pretty quickly.
As a matter of fact, folks used to even run extraneous blog commenting campaigns, doing up to 100+ comments on a daily basis to quickly gather valuable back-links, drive more traffic and rank higher in the Google search results.
But, pretty soon the content king – Google realized the irony of the situation, and started penalizing websites that sold or gave away non nofollow links. As a result, even the default comments in all the newer versions of blogging engines like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and the likes of them, had nofollow links by default.
Ever since then it has become a trend, and currently everybody has started using “nofollow” link tag – and even from social networking sites like FaceBook or Orkut, all that you can get is only nofollow links. But, social media is now becoming a great way to drive massive traffic and expose your business identity to the public.
Blog commenting has become a dying art and it is only a good way to build good rapport with fellow bloggers and improve the daily traffic to your website/blog. Something similar goes with the social networking and social media platforms, as one can only improve the traffic not Page Rank and search rankings with these links!
When it comes to link-building with so many constraints, a word of caution would be to remember the sheer fact that links to too many directories can make your site look like a link-farm – so beware Google is watching you!
Article directories are definitely the best bets to generate good backlinks. You may try running an article marketing campaign at reputed sites like EzineArticles.com GoArticles.com, Constant-Content.com, ArticlesBase.com and generate some targeted traffic as well as quality links.
Then the social bookmarking services like Digg Buzz.Yahoo, Del.icio.us, Reddit, StumbleUpon, can come in handy in exposing your website to a wider range of audience and getting more traffic!
But, the bottom-line is that quality content, on-page organic SEO, and seamless user experience are the most effective ways to improve the overall SEO and search rankings of your website.
Last, but definitely not the least, you may want to add a robots.txt file on your root directory to exercise control over the pages that you DON’T want to be indexed by Google Crawler, Adsense Crawler and other bots. For instance, in a WordPress blog, you don’t want Google to crawl the /wp-admin folder, so you can add following line in robots.txt file –
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /wp-admin
Note: Adding a sitemap to your site is a must!