Link Building 101 - Resources and Tools

Every now and then, there is a forum post worth bookmarking and a Search Engine Watch thread that compiles an excellent list of link-building resources is such a post. The post, and the comments that follow, provides for a very comprehensive list of tools, articles, forum threads and knowledge bases that can be found on the Internet.



Good job Nacho.

Another Color Scheme Generator

Yet another color scheme generator:



http://www.wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html



VIA: Dave's Chalkboard

SEO Toolbar

InsideGoogle reported on the first-ever SEO Toolbar which assists site owners with tracking backlinks for all the major search engines and if the page is listed in DMOZ. The toolbar is offered by Garry Grant's Search Engine Optimization, Inc.



Some people may know Garry. He's played a guitar since the age of 19 and has appeared with the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi. His career in web development started when he founded DAG Web Studios about 10 years ago. He also holds a degree, Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, from Monmouth University.



So does all of this make for another must-have toolbar? Not really. Garry is an entrepreneur with a lot of savvy. As a self-professed leader in the SEO Industry, this toolbar (as most are) is just a gimmick.



It boasts that it will provide you with data from 9 search engines. In all actuality, there are only 2 that you need to concern yourself with, Yahoo and Google. All the rest are derived from these two.



One thing that sticks in my craw about this toolbar is that you are required to submit an email address and your Zip Code before you can download it. That is enough for me to pass it up.



Better Alternatives are Available



I use a service, Uptimebot, which will deliver the exact same results as this toolbar. Here are the results for this site Webstractions. I am sure that a bookmarklet could be fashioned to pluck the current page from the address bar and post it to the form. If anybody creates a bookmarklet, please let me know and I will blog it for you.



If you really want advanced linkback analysis though, I recommend Axandra's (maker of Arelis) Link Popularity Check. It is a free desktop program that checks the link popularity status of your web site on several search engines and compares it to other web sites on the Internet (for example your competitors).



Link Popularity Check is completely safe to install on your system. It will not change the system registry and it will not make any unauthorized connections from your system. The software also includes an uninstaller.

Another Useless Google Trivia Bit

Ever notice that freshdate tag in the Google SERPS is sometimes one day earlier than the actual date in the cached version of that page? This is because the timestamp of the cached version is simply Greenwich Mean Time (GMT -0 hours). The freshdate tag is based on Pacific Standard Time (GMT -8 hours). There will be an 8 hour window where the date will not overlap.



VIA: Zorgloob

Send Firefox to your Desktop

A mozillaZine member, wig_out_on_me, offers up a Windows Registry file that will create a Desktop namespace for Firefox similar to the way Internet Explorer, My Computer and the Recycle Bin shortcuts are set up. This namespace provides for a context menu with Profile Manager, Safe Mode, etc. included on it. Any shortcuts created from this namespace will retain the added context menu items which is handy for the Quick Launch toolbar.





VIA: Gemal's Psyched Blog

DHTML Lab: Popup Calendar 1.2

In the DHTML Lab section of WebReference, they introduce their first maintenance release of Popup Calendar. They have added better navigation bar styling and the ability to clear read-only input fields. Also included, new functionality that enables you to separate form elements to display any combination of a user-selected date, month and year.



This is a stunning piece of code that you will just have to see for yourself.

(Click on the to access the calendar features)

List of Photoshop Tutorials, Tips & Tricks

Just browsing around the net and came up with these interesting sites dealing with Photoshop. Tutorials, tip, tricks ranging from beginning to advanced. A little bit for everybody. Enjoy!

• Janee's Photoshop Tutorials, Courses in Photoshop
  
• Tutorial Outpost
  
• Good-Tutorials.com
  
• PhotoshopCAFE
  
• Photoshop Tips & Tricks
  
• Photoshop Tutorials
  
• PurePhotoshop Tutorials & Articles
  
• Free Adobe Photoshop Tutorials
  
• 80Four Adobe Photoshop Tutorials, Video Tutorials
  
• CreativePro Photoshop Articles
  
• Photoshop for Photographers
  

If you have any to share, just drop them in a comment or two or three.

UPDATE: Oct 20, 2004

• Studio-X Photoshop Tutorials
  
• Axialis Tutorials
  
• HeathRowe Photoshop Tutorials
  
• Photosjop Tips & Learning
  
• TeamPhotoshop Tutorials & Tips
  
• DesignsByMark PS Tips & Tutorials
  
• Grafika PS Tutorials (Czech)
  
• BioRust PS Tutorials
  
• CBT Cafe PS Tutorials & Articles
  
• Photoshop Lover

UPDATE: Oct 23, 2004

• Creative Bits: PS Tips Blog
  
• 3 Simple Improvements (Greg Roberts)
  
• Planet Photoshop Tutorials
  
• Computer Darkroom (Misc Tutorials)
  
• DevCo Photo Tutorials
  
• Nebulus Designs PS Tutorials
  
• Phong PS Tutorials
  
• Eyewire PS Tips & Tutorials
  
• Think Dan PS Tutorials (Index listing)
  
• Magic Pixel PS Workshop

UPDATE: Oct 27, 2004

• Digital Photography Tutorials
  
• Informit Photoshop Articles
  
• The Makeshift Miracle Tutorials
  
• The Slimarillion
  
• Shanzcan Photoshop Tutorials
  
• Photoshop Brushes Tutorials
  
• GrafX Design PS Tutorials
  
• Pegaweb Web Design & PS Tutorials
  
• RetouchPRO Tutorials
  
• Carl Volk's Photoshop Tips

Blog-style Buttons on the Fly

Adam Kalsey has a handy online tool to create those little buttons that everyone is so fond of. The tool uses Bill Zeller's button maker script which is written in PHP, so you could host this application yourself with without much trouble.

UPDATE: It does not appear that the script is available on Bill's site.

VIA: Band of Gonzo Forums

Aggregate your own RSS newsfeed from Yahoo! News

Jacob Rosenberg blogs an entry into today's Yahoo!Search blog to expose some of the more useful (and lesser known) features of Yahoo! News.



He gives examples of advanced search queries to over 7,000 Yahoo! News sources. You can filter your content based on Location, News Source, Category, Language, and News Type. You can even compose your own advanced search by using the above search commands or use their advanced news search page.



There is also a new xml button on the News Search result page, in which you can now turn any search into a fresh full-blown RSS 2.0 feed.

"For example hurricane location:florida gets you your own ongoing feed of hurricane news from Florida. The only restriction is that the source parameter doesn't work in RSS mode, and some providers may choose to opt out of RSS results."

This is probably the best new feature of all. You can roll your own news feed.

Improving SEO in your Blogger Template

SEbasic has some great suggestions for simple Blogger template changes you can make to optimize them for better rankings. He has complete sample code all laid out for you to paste into your templates. Worth a peak!

Finding mirrored hosts and duplicate content

One of the interesting technical challenges that every search engine comes up against is identifying duplicate content. Super-geek, Greg Linden, learns of a whitepaper from his friend Jeff Dean who co-authored (along with Krishna Bharat, Andrei Z. Broder and Monika Rauch Henzinger) a paper (PDF) on this very topic.

"The paper analyzes the performance of several techniques for detecting mirrors, from simple approaches like the similar IP address or hostname to more complicated and quite clever analysis of the link structure of sites. The paper concludes that a content-based approach (called 'shingles' in the paper) works well but that a combination of several approaches works best."

List of Search Engine IP Addresses

You can see the latest list of Search Engine IP Addresses and hostnames here. Included on the list (last updated in September) are:

• Fast/AllTheWeb
  
  
• Alta Vista
  
  
• Lycos
  
  
• Inktomi
  
  
• WiseNut
  
  
• Google
  
  
• Ask Jeeves/Teoma
  
  
• Misc Search Engines
  
  
• Non Spiders

Robots.txt Validator

An online utility that will validate your robots.txt file.

VIA: Band of Gonzos Forums

Google Top Ten Search for "powered by"

An interesting observation by Evan Williams for the search term "powered by" (with quotes) in Google. The search will pull up results that mostly contain the term in the anchor text of links pointing to the sites (view the cache version of the pages to see this).



Anchor text is one of the most powerful ranking factors at Google. The results are a pretty good gauge of how many pages are powered by certain software or services. Of course, pages with higher PageRank could influence the list and not just the brute strength method.



The top ten, at the time of this post, are:

1. Apache.org
   
   
2. MySQL.com
   
   
3. PHP.net
   
   
4. Blogger.com
   
   
5. Bravenet.com
   
   
6. FreeBSD.org
   
   
7. ListBot.com
   
   
8. RedHat.com
   
   
9. RingSurf.com
   
   
10. Linux.org
    
    

Surprisingly, Google.com did not make the cut. It came in at #14.



Your results may vary, depending on your location. Evan actually had Apache, Blogger and MySQL in the top three.

Cloaking 101 - Questions and Answers

A frank and very open discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums regarding cloaking techniques ... and the pitfalls.



The thread has liberal amounts of thoughts from their resident "industrial strength cloaker", Fantomaster. You will learn such things as IP Delivery, Shadow Domains, and a host of other tricks of the cloaking trade.



Meanwhile, Larry and Sergey are in Japan on their promotional tour. They had this to say:

"The company is also working hard to stop search engine optimizers (SEO) from distorting search results...There are many SEOs that are trying to manipulate Google. Our biggest message is that through our products, we always want to promote a better and healthier service."

No that was not in response to the thread at SEW, it is just Peter's quirky sense of humor in his blog post today.

Turn Google News into an RSS Feed

A simple php & curl script to turn Google News queries into an RSS feed. Please be warned though, this is a scraping script. 'nuf said.



I tested the script out in my Sage reader for Firefox, and it is works very well. No reason why it would not work in most readers.



Since you can not use the Google API to query the Google News area, this is about the only way to get a feed from them. It would be nice if Google would start providing feeds for their News Search though.

FCKeditor - Text Editor for the Internet

Don't let this name fool you, but the FCKeditor is a full fledged text editor for Internet. This HTML text editor brings to the web many of the powerful functionalities of known desktop editors like Word. It's really lightweight and doesn't require any kind of installation in the client computer for it is all TTW (or Through The Web).



It is also Open Source and jam packed with features, including Internet Explorer 5.5+ and Gecko browser (Mozilla / Netscape) compatibility, skinnable, link creation and anchor support, table creation and cell editing, form fields, right click context menus support, spell checker, CSS support, automatic browser detection, multi-language support, integration with many scripting languages (ie: PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, etc.) and image / file uploading.



You can demo it here.

ListGarden RSS Feed Generator

ListGarden is an Open Source RSS feed generator

from Software Garden Products.



Features:

• Creates and maintains RSS feeds
  
  
• Produces both XML and optional human-readable companion HTML
  
  
• Runs either on your PC or on a web server (perl)
  
  
• Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux
  
  
• Open source
  
  
• Requires no knowledge of XML or the RSS data format
  
  
• Tuned for quick manual additions of new items and simple editing

Lee Underwood has a very nice review of ListGarden at WebReference.com.

Toolbar Browser - Authoring & Management Tool

The Toolbar Browser is a complete Toolbar Authoring and Management tool. You can use it to manage dozens of toolbars in a simple tabbed control to save valuable browser space. It also includes all the standard features for search, navigation, popup blocking, etc., so you will never need another toolbar.



Toolbar Authoring & Custom Toolbars

You can take the best features from all your favorite toolbars and combine them into your own super toolbar. Because the Toolbar Browser is also a complete authoring tool, that is exactly what you can do. Designing a new toolbar is as simple as creating an HTML page. Toolbars can be written in XML, HTML, Java or even Flash.



FreeWare

The Toolbar Browser is a freeware application. There is nothing you need to purchase, no royalties or fees, so you can create and distribute a great toolbar for your website, service or business.



Distributing your own toolbar builds customer loyalty and brand awareness. Toolbar Distribution is also very simple. Just insert the toolbar code into any web page.



VIA: SEO Book

Peer2Mail

Peer2Mail lets you store and share files on your web-mail account. If you have a web mail account with large storage space, you can use P2M to store files on it. Web-mail providers such as Gmail (Google Mail), Walla!, Yahoo and more, provide storage space that ranges from 100MB to 2GB.

P2M splits the file you want to share/store zips and optionally encrypts it. P2M then sends the file segments one by one to your account. Once P2M uploaded all file segments, you can download them and use P2M to merge the segments back to the original file.