All posts by Charlie Williams

Search geek, content evangelist, and link engineer, Charlie is a digital consultant at SEOptimise. You can catch him talking SEO, or about food, on twitter, @pagesauce or on Google+.

A couple of months ago we took a look at how you can reclaim links that you are simply throwing away. For the second look at how to fix common link leaks, we’re going to look at issues around site canonicalisation, and how easy it is to lose link authority through simple duplicate URLs.

As before, this is a simple way many sites lose valuable links without even realising. By plugging these leaks, we’ve helped clients gain an instant boost in link authority, without irking anyone on Google’s anti-spam team.

The many faces of a homepage

The best place to start when digging for link leaks is actually one of the checks you should carry out when looking at a new or prospective client for the first time – how many ways can you find the site homepage? Type your domain name into your browser, and then do the same for all the possible variations:

  • http://www.example.com
  • http://example.com
  • http://www.example.com/index.htm (or index.html, .aspx, .php or whatever the CMS/server uses)
  • http://www.example.com/

Two days, three tracks, over 50 speakers. IonSearch 2013 certainly didn’t lack in ambition, nor in potential for some insightful search marketing conversation and thought.

And it did not disappoint; we thoroughly enjoyed our in time in Leeds, and came away with plenty of takeaways. With so many talks (over 40 different talks/panels), we sadly couldn’t see everything there, but we’ve put together some of the key takeaways from our favourite sessions of the conference.

In London hundreds of SEOs have gathered for LinkLove, and as it is a day of sharing tips on getting more links, we thought we would join in.

As the easy self-publishing or submission tactics fall by the wayside, link building has become a far more creative, and time-consuming, process.

But at SEOptimise, as well as building links through content, we also regularly boost clients’ link profiles without typing a word. There’s no asking for links, nor risking the wrath of Google’s anti-spam team.

This is link reclamation – fixing existing links that point to broken or inefficiently redirected pages on your site.