This is not the first big list of link building technique posts, there’s a couple of others here, here and here. My intention here was really to create a list which was just link building tactics, no recommendations like ‘use spell check’ and ‘get your site to validate’- although these are fair points they can’t really be called tactics. I’ve dug into my old bookmarks to come up with some of the best techniques around as well as some which many will consider outdated. I’m sure there’s plenty more to be found.

I would guess most SEO’s are probably only regularly using a small fraction of the link building techniques on this list, it’s easy to get into a routine of just using the means you find the easiest so hopefully this big list might encourage some out of box type thinking in your link building.

The list is certainly not exhaustive and some of these techniques I definitely steer clear of these days although I would assume they still work. Please feel free to add anything I’ve overlooked in the comments with links if possible. Enjoy!

Directories

The emphasis has to be on quality over quantity with directories. A few still offer PageRank/ trust passing links. Most free directories don’t seem to although in uncompetitive niches you might still be able to use free directory submission on a large scale with manipulated anchor text to target your keywords. Local directories still work pretty well also.

1. Buy high quality listings on Yahoo, BOTW, business.com etc
2. Get a free DMOZ listing either by submitting or better yet, become an editor
3. Get an AboutUs spotlight written for your business
4. Find a list of all the niche directories in your industry and submit to them
5. Look for local business directories in your area and submit to them
6. Hire a company to build 1200 low quality directory links (might still give you a boost in uncompetitive industries)

Articles

There’s only a small number of article directories worth submitting to now but these are well worth using still as their links pass some value and you can easily manipulate anchor text and build deep links.

7. Write quality articles and publish top article directories like Ezine, Buzzle, GoArticles, & Article Dashboard
8. Write articles for work.com
9. Write articles for Infobarrel
10. Hire a company to write lots of 400 word articles and submit to syndication services link article marketer or iSnare with about the author backlinks

Online Press releases

Press releases were all the rage a few years ago. The usefulness of online press release sites for juice passing links is fairly low (although again you can deep link and control anchor text). If your story is good enough getting picked up on Google news through these sites may be one road to get into the mainstream media.

11. If you’ve got news worthy content run paid press releases through sites like PRWeb
12. Syndicate press releases to free PR sites

RSS

RSS scraping can occasionally give you new backlinks, although the sites which your feeds are published on are usually low quality

13. Create an RSS feed if you haven’t already got one for your company news. Submit it to RSS syndication sites like Feedbomb

Buy links

Still fairly essential in competitive markets, there’s definitely a right way and a wrong way to buy links. Basically the bigger the footprint the bigger the risk so tread with caution.

14. Buy quality links from webmasters and bloggers by contacting them directly and offering cash
15. Buy links through a link broker
16. Buy .edu links
17. Use a link network like TNX to buy a range of cheap low quality links
18. Buy inlinks
19. Buy links from local journalists
20. Use paid review services like sponsored reviewed, reviewme or pay per post
21. Buy cheap dofollow banners directly from small publishers, forum moderators and local businesses
22. Pay forum moderators or regular contributors to add your link to their signiture
23. Buy blogroll links

2-way link exchange (aka recipricol linking)

You link to me, I’ll link back. Maybe it shouldn’t work still but it does seem to. It makes sense that a significant portion of your entire link profile will be reciprocal, but don’t go overboard and only link out to quality, relevant sites.

24. Create a links page, look for sites with their own links pages and exchange links (still works well for local businesses)
25. Exchange in-content links (ideally on new pages as they’re added)

3-way links

Slightly dubious tactic. Only use in moderation and in conjunction with other 1-way link building techniques, else its going to look like you’re part of a link network

26. Create microsites or blogs on standalone domains and use these sites to trade off links to your main domain
27. Use a link exchange network like Linkvault or co-op to exchange links

Social media

There’s plenty of new ’social media’ type sites popping up all the time. Generally the links passed by these sites have little value in their own right but they can help to get your content in front of the right audience which can lead to organic links. Use in conjunction with link bait.

28. Create pages/ profiles on Facebook, Bebo and MySpace (nofollow)
29. Setup LinkedIn profiles (nofollow)
30. Create Squidoo lenses
31. Create hubpages
32. Answer relevant questions on Yahoo answers with backlinks (nofollow)
33. Answer relevant questions on LinkedIn answers with backlinks
34. Submit your content to Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit (use voting rings to vote your content up in these sites)
35. Bookmark your site on social bookmarking sites like delicious
36. Register your brand name on hundreds of social media sites with KnowEm – some will include links in your profile

Blogging

Blogs are hot-beds of link activity. If you have a blog and are prepared to link out, great things can happen!

37. Setup a blog within your main domain and submit it to blog directories like BOTW blog directory
38. Link out generously to other blogs to get on the radar and gain trackback links
39. Write guest posts on similar blogs
40. Comment on loads of other blogs
41. Buy blog comments
42. Swap blogroll links with other bloggers
43. Setup blogs on Blogspot, Wordpress.com or typepad.com, post a couple of articles with backlinks to your main site

Request links

You don’t ask you don’t get. Still one of the most cost effective ways of building quality links

44. Ask for links by analyzing your competitors backlinks and contacting their webmasters seeing if they’ll link to you
45. Ask for links from universities, local government or trade bodies

Content for links

As webmasters start to understand the value of their content more offering some sort of content exchange adds an extra punch to the classic link exchange

46. Identify content gaps on other sites or blogs, produce relevant content on your site and tell the webmaster about it
47. Ask to write articles/ sections for other sites for free with links in the text
48. Give great testimonials to your suppliers and make sure they add a link under your name
49. Get speaking gigs and stands at conferences/ trade shows
50. Give quotes to journalists for their stories

Forums

Although forum links are going to be devalued by search engines (because they’re so easy to get) having a number of links from decent forums on relevant threads will give a small boost and can drive traffic.

51. Contribute to industry forums using backlinks in your threads where relevant
52. Pay someone to spam write forum posts for you
53. Start your own forum on your domain- good forum posts attract natural links

Images/ Video

Done right multimedia can drive tonnes of links, but there’s often more skill/ money involved in the implementation which many SEO teams may be lacking.

54. Create informative or funny video’s on your site and make them embeddable with text links in a <noscript> tag- contact bloggers or sites who might like your vid’s and get them to embed them.
55. Submit your videos to video sites like YouTube and include links in the description (nofollow)
56. Give away free stock imagery with an attribution licence
57. Use an image hotlinking script

Link Bait

Link bait as a term is a bit of a fad, but the concept of creating quality, engaging content and promoting it to get links is a sound one.

58. Write funny, useful or controversial blog posts on your site designed to do well on social voting sites like Digg
59. Run some industry research like a salary survey and publish the results on your site
60. Create a ‘fake bait’ piece
61. Create a free tool or application (think about iPhone apps for a link frenzy) and host it on your site for downloads
62. Create a big list of free resources or top posts on a particular niche with lots of links out, just like this post!
63. Give stuff away- send free t-shirts or merchandise to bloggers in your niche or offer free subscriptions and ask them to review you
64. Do a promotion on twitter. Anything even vaguely clever will attract links from the new media press at the moment
65. Conduct an interview with prominent bloggers/ industry figures. At the very least you should get a link off the interviewee.
66. Setup an industry news feed
67. Write anything controversial/ defamatory

Templates & software

68. Create a blog for wordpress, blogger, typepad with a footer link back to your site
69. Think about creating templates for other open source CMS’s like Joomla or Drupal which have less competition in the template market
70. Create free Joomla components or plugins and get a link off the Joomla extensions directory (also embed links in the component if possible)
71. Create a free image hosting or fileshare system on your site. 301 redirect download links which haven’t been used for 1 month back to your homepage or other sites
72. Create a free javascript hit counter with an embedded backlink (there’s plenty of these out there already so you’ll need to promote the hit counter with Adwords)

Sponsorship & donations

These may be seen by some as paid links by the backdoor but sponsorship is a great way to get links on quality sites who would not otherwise link out.

73. Sponsor a university radio station
74. Sponsor a university sports team
75. Donate to charities and get links from their donor pages
76. Sponsor a forum with a dofollow banner link
77. Sponsor a well known podcast, get links off their site and from their listeners blogs
78. Create donar pages on sites like Kiva.org
79. Sponsor an industry conference

Advertising

80. Advertise on local radio. Ad sales guys will usually agree to give you a website link included in the ad package
81. Advertise on blogs which have ‘thanks to our sponsors pages‘

Miscellaneous

There are literally hundreds more link building tactics you could use. Here I’ve jotted down a few which sprung to mind to fill up the 100, add your own in the comments…

82. Place job ads on university or industry job boards with a backlink to your application form. Once the application deadline passes 301 the app form page to your homepage
83. Create an SEO friendly affiliate program
84. 301 your linked to error 404 pages back to your homepage
85. 301 redirect cannibalized/ duplicate pages to your main page
86. Buy up expiring domains with PageRank, use the way back machine to retrieve their old content and host the old site with some backlinks to your sites
87. Buy up expiring domains with PageRank and 301 them straight to your main site
88. Nepotistic links- make use of other sites you own, parent or child companies
89. Get links from any trade associations or industry memberships you pay for
90. Write into your contracts with suppliers that they have to link to you from their site in order to retain your business
91. If your sites pretty submit it to CSS galleries
92. Create online tests and give participants badges to put on their sites of your community
93. Create membership badges your sites members can paste onto their sites to show they’re part of your community
94. Join local networking groups and get a link off their site- use the group to network with other local businesses and negotiate more links
95. Create autoposting scraper sites and stuff them with backlinks to your main site
96. Search for mentions of your brand name which don’t include a link.
97. Use Google alerts to pick up on new mentions of your brand name quickly, if those mentions don’t have a link, ask for one quick
98. Run your own industry conference/ blogger meetup
99. Add your links to wikipedia pages or create your own page for your company (nofollow)
100. Add internal links to keywords throughout your site. If you use wordpress this plugin will help or this one for Joomla
101. One for luck- win industry awards

I was in my bank setting up a new stocks and shares ISA the other day and was asked the question which anyone who’s ever done any sort of investing will be familiar with- what is my attitude to risk?

Image: http://www.personalmoney.in/wp-content/uploads/investment_pyramid.gif

That question really resonates with me because I think this is a question we have to ask and answer everyday when doing SEO work. At the high risk end of the spectrum you stand to lose everything, your site could be recovably damaged by risky SEO. At the other end you might stay safe but the risk is never seeing any results.

So what would the risk profiles of typical SEO investors look like?

Level 1: No risk (aka cash)

You are not willing to take any chances with your website or brand. Your site is too high profile to risk any onsite tactics and in fact you don’t have any control over the website even if you wanted to. Compliance won’t let you, or your agency talk to any third party sites so link building is out the question. Should you even be reading an SEO blog- someone could be watching!

Your SEO tactic of choice: hoping for rankings

Level 2: Low Risk (aka corporate bonds)

You are highly brand sensitive so link building is difficult, you don’t really want anyone to know you’re doing SEO work. Recipricol links or putting your name to content is out the question. You don’t want to risk using SEO tactics like directory submission in case Google decides to start treating this as paid links and penalise you.

Your SEO tactic of choice: Onsite optimisation

Level 3: Medium Risk (aka property)

You accept that rankings can go up as well as down and are looking at a long and medium as well as short term strategy. You’re willing to try out some aggressive tactics but are aware that people are watching so anything onsite has to be completely above board.

Your SEO tactic of choice: A varied portfolio of link building activity

Level 4: Medium- high risk (aka shares)

You’re interested in the long term and don’t want to lose it all but are willing to fly by the seat of your pants when it comes to stuff like link aquisition strategies. You might run a couple of sites so if one gets hit by a penalty you don’t return to zero.

Your SEO tactic of choice: Paid links

Level 5: High risk (aka Complex investments)

You have a large number of sites and are willing to run the risk of one or more of them being completely blacklisted. You probably brought your domains from aftermarket or are hacking other peoples rather than growing them yourself. You have no organic links or unique content. You monitise your sites with Adsense, affiliate or paid links and just want traffic, and fast.

Your SEO tactic of choice: cloning and cloaking

My own attitude to risk sits in different places for the different sites I work on. For some of my own ventures I have no problem putting myself in the medium high risk bracket however for clients I mostly stay around level 3.

Obviously your own attitude to risk is your own choice and you have to do what you think is right for your campaign and the long term good of your site. Don’t forget though there’s indirect risk associated with the lower end of the risk spectrum- the risk of failure, which increases greatly if you dip below level 3.

I realise this subject has been addressed plenty of times before but I wanted to wade in because its still a topic there’s some confusion over and I’d say some fairly bad advice floating around about.

The title of this post obviously starts with an assumption, that reciprocal links do still help your search rankings. To this day I’ve never seen any tangible evidence that link swapping when done correctly can harm your rankings, as some prominent SEO’s claim, and in almost every case links gained in this way will have at least a small benefit to your rankings, all other things being equal (which they never are- more on this later).

So there’s plenty of occassions where links might be reciprocated and plenty of tactics which are used to build 2 way links but essentially there are 2 types of reciprocal links:

1. The types of links which sit on ‘links’ pages and are there usually just for the purpose of link exchange
2. The type of links which occur (often naturally) when 1 site links to a page on another site from within an article while the other site also links back from one of their own articles. You get this lots with blogs becuase bloggers who read each other stuff will often link to one another regularly.

There’s a persistent argument spread, I believe wrongly, around the SEO world that because a link is sat on a page called ‘links.html’ or ‘resources.html’ it is immediately less valuable than if it were sat on any other page. And furthermore if there’s a link back from the other site also on a page called ‘links.html’ or something similar the link is further devalued. I’ve heard some go so far as to say this type of linking does your site more harm than good- in almost every case I’ve seen this is nonsense.

There are however a number of very real reasons you don’t want all your links to come from links pages including:

1. Links pages don’t attract any external link weight, that is to say I can think of very few reasons any site would organically link to a links page on another site, unless it was a really useful list of hard to find resources. This means all the link weight associated with links pages will usually come from internal links. This isn’t the end of the world, its just important to realise a page with no external links can only ever offer a certain amount of value to you through a link.
2. Links pages link out to large numbers of external sites- again in itself this isn’t a problem. Pages on popular directories can link out to hundreds of sites and still pass some value/ PageRank to each one but if a site is small and has few external links itself and links out to 100 sites from 1 page each of those links is going to have relatively little weight.
3. Links pages don’t have enough content to make the external links contextual meaning unless there’s a high degree of relevance between the two sites involved in the exchange and all of the other links on the same page are equally as relevant a links page link is unlikely to pass the kind of authority which tells the search engines “the website at the end of this link is the best resources for [enter keyword here]“.
4. Sites who engage in links page reciprocal linking are often low quality and attract dubious outbound links. This is by far the biggest problem with mass reciprocal link exchange IMO. The types of sites who engage in it aren’t your trusted universitys, local government or library sites which pass stacks of authority. They tend not even to be prominient bloggers or media sites who make excellent link targets. They tend to be small businesses with a fairly limited link profile (meaning they often only get their links from link exchange). Also these sites have a tendancy to link to dubious sources or fall foul of bait and switch tactics. This leads to your links being part of a bad neighbourhood- at an extreme end this could lead to penalties even if your site isn’t the one linking out to dodgy partners.

Dispite all this negativity I still think using link pages or reciprocal link exchanges has some merit, particularly if you are targeting some really easy keywords and just need a few links to put you on the map. For example if you owned a butcher shop in a row with 2 other shops and you wanted to rank for ‘butcher brighton’ getting a link from the baker and the newsagent on either side of you is probably a good idea and linking back to them is absolutely fine. Here’s what I’d avoid though:

• Mass link exchange networks
• Anything automated where you have to install code on your site (these are usually multi-way linking scemes rather than reciprocal actually)
• Linking to non-English speaking sites (higher spam risk with these)
• Linking off topic

The old test of ‘would you still be pursuing this link partnership if search engines didn’t exist’ is a great guide here. The local butcher and baker certainly would. The butcher and the Indian offshore data input company less likely.

Content based reciprocal links

Looking at all of the issues noted in the reasons links pages aren’t that great bit above it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to work out that many of these problems can be circumnavigated by swapping links on pages within your website rather than from dedicated links pages. I know of at least one company who specialise almost exclusively in this type of link building and with good results. This would probably count as one of those tactics which will work great for a bit, and in moderation. if it gets too widespread or spammy it might get devalued but as part of your overall link building effort this will work at the moment.

Why don’t search engines clamp down on reciprocal links?

Quite simply I don’t think they need to. If you go overboard with link swapping and create a reciprical link directory off the back of your site which you don’t properly regulate sooner or later you’re going to link out to some crap and get penialised. Aside from this its really in the best interests of the engines to keep links flowing around the web, particularly amoung small businesses who may find it hard to attract links in other ways. What’s more by tarring all links pages and reciprocal links with the same brush you’d be damaging some pretty useful links (along with a load of garbage) like this resources page on greenpeace.

Why most SEO’s don’t recommend reciprocal links

I sometimes think its in the best interests of the SEO industry to make things seem harder than they need to. Its really easy for a trusted SEO to say ‘reciprocal links don’t work anymore’ and find some anecdotal evidence to back it up. The problem wih all SEO conundrums is that its never a level playing field. While something might appear to be true like ‘links pages have no value’ actually there’s stacks of other factors at play and like with most things in life there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it.

I will close by saying I personally very rarely use reciprocal link exchange and particularly not with links pages anymore. That says more about the size and nature of sites I work with than my views on whether they work or not. My best and final advice on the subject would be to make sure you’re using a good mix of link building tactics and whenever you’re linking out make sure its to quality sites.

While the truth about link building is that many search markets (particularly local) are still really easy to crack with some fairly unsophisticated tactics, other markets are notoriously tough to build links in, either due to their extreme competitiveness (like insurance) or the stigma attached to them (like gambling). In this post I want to share my experiences of working in tough markets and some tips to planning and running your link building campaigns when it seems the world is against you and your site.

Firstly, what do I call a tough market? Well some of the markets I’ve run link campaigns in which I’ve considered tough would be:

• Gambling, casinos, poker etc
• High value financial products like insurance, credit cards, loans
• Travel (at the uber generic end of the keyword market- think terms like ‘flights’ or ‘holidays’)
• Dating
• Pharmaceuticals

And there’s really 3 main acid tests of the ‘toughness’ of a search marketplace:

• Keyword competition – how many people are competiing for the same pool of keywords.
• Keyword value – the most valuable keywords are going to be the most heavily promoted with SEO, looking at CPC data from Adwords is a great indicator of this. If companies are willing to spend £25/ click (like in credit cards) then you can bet its pretty valuable to be at number 1 in the organic listings for that term.
• The bargepole test. If you were a webmaster and someone from this site asked you to link, would you be happy for your site to ‘touch’ theirs? For example most webmasters are scared stiff of linking to the 3 p’s (porn, pills and poker sites) because of their association with spamming. This makes link building tricky.

OK so we know we’re in a tough market but what can we do about it? You can’t get rankings without links in competitive search markets so you need to find a way of building some decent links.

The tough markets problem can really be seperated into two groups with quite distinct difficulties:

Problem 1: The competition is too powerful

Most people are OK to link to your site if they have good reason (this might be money or great content) but the market is so saturated by big players with 7 figure SEO budgets you need literally tens of thousands of quality links to compete.

Example: Car insurance – Confused.com have over 1/4 million backlinks

Problem 2: The market is too dirty

Other websites won’t link to you because of the industry you’re in regardless of how good your content is or how much you pay them. However the top ranking competition in this market do not have a  particularly strong portfolio of links (usually they just have a lot of them)

Example: Casinos – 888.com have nearly 300,000 links but almost all of them are garbage (relatively speaking)

The truth is you rarely see an market or a set of keywords where the two problems are compounded. I guess this is because everyone’s in the same boat. The worlds best link builders struggle in dirty markets so building lots and lots of high quality links to an online casino or poker site is basically impossible for anyone.

Where to start

Below is a rough guide for how I’d start a link building campaign in one of these markets.

1. Competitor analysis

I personally like to start with some really good competitor analysis. Not looking for individual link targets at first but rather getting a feel for the general patterns and trends in the backlink profiles of the guys who are ranking well already. What I’m really trying to do at this stage is get inside the heads of your competitors link builder. What tactics do they favour, what tricks are they using?

2. Target setting

Although setting targets for a link building campaign can be a bit like blind fire you need to get a sense of how many links you’re going to need and from what sources. Linkscape’s mosTrust scoring is pretty useful for this type of analysis.

3. Resourcing

What link building resources you have available in your team are going to define what tactics you are able to use. For example if you don’t have a video guy and don’t have the cash to get one in then video is probably out. Identify all the link building tactics which you have the capabilities and budget to do (and do well). Don’t worry at this stage whether you think they’ll work or not in your market, its easy to be overly dismissive at this stage and throw the baby out with the bathwater.

4. Brainstorming

In order to promote your website effectively you need to understand why it exists and for what reason Google should rank it high for your chosen keywords. For example, what makes my car insurance comparison site better than confused.com?

From here you can develop ideas for content or online PR around your brand. This is much easier to do if you’re working with an established brand with a strong offline presence.

5. Find examples

Next you need to sense check your list of tactics against what your competitors are doing. For example if you think paid links could work well look for examples of where your competitors have used this tactic and see how effective it has been. If you are looking at riskier tactics you’ll also want to do some due diligence at this stage as to whether an competitors are picking up penalties for any of the tactics they’ve used.

6. Prioritise tactics

Now based on this research and your own experience take your list of tactics and put them in order of how effective you think they will be at achieving your goals.

For example I usually find guest posting more effective than article syndication, a few competitors are using guest posting and we have some cool ideas for content we could develop- therefore guest posting would come before article syndication on my tactics plan.

7. Planning

Finally assign resources and costs to each tactic and set goal specific targets. You’ll definitely want to be using a range of tactics for any link building campaign in a tough market so your goals might look something like-

• Guest posting – find 30 blogs to publish unique content with an average PageRank of 2
• Article marketing – Publish 10 quality articles with an average of 25 backlinks/ article
• Paid links – buy 100 links from sites with a mozTrust of 3+

8. Timing

Before you begin implentation you should also set a timeframe for link building activity to keep your growth profile as natural as possible. In tough markets people will be watching and if you’re doing anything even slightly off white you need to be very careful about taking it slow.

What works and what doesn’t?

You really need to analyse this on a case by case basis and use your own skills to their fullest. There’s always more than one way to crack these markets if you’re good enough at the tactics you favour the most. Its quite surprising what tactics still seem to work, particularly when you get deeper into the ‘dirty’ industries. Here’s my quick rundown of what I know about link building these industries just to get you started. Please feel free to leave your own experience/ advice in the comments.

Gambling, casinos, poker etc

Paid links are still massive, pretty much all the top ranked guys still have heavy paid link footprints but they’re also the biggest brands so its hard to know if its the paid links or the few genuine value earned links which are delivering the rankings.

High value financial products like insurance, credit cards, loans

The bigger brands are doing more online PR work now. Its much harder for affiliates to compete in this space now. These guys used to use a lot of co-op type links but that doesn’t seem to have the impact it used to

Travel (at the uber generic end of the keyword market- think terms like ‘flights’ or ‘holidays’)

In travel there’s no excuse not to be doing clever content based link building. There’s countless articles, videos, photos or tools you could create to attract organic links in this market and plenty of people ready to link out so get creative.

Dating

Has got really competitive since the national newspapers all got heavily into branded dating sites. Small players used to use a lot of link exchange and sourced low quality links cheaply from adult sites. I can’t see this kind of thing working now. If I was getting into this market today I would probably use blogging and affiliates to build links.

Pharmaceuticals

Bait and switch tactics were always absolutely rife in this industry and these still seem to be working to some extent looking at the top sites on popular terms. Exact match domaining combined with cheap directory submission tactics also seem to work still, as does comment spamming. Needless to say you’ll want to stay clear of any of the latter, these are mostly suicide sites which won’t be around in a few weeks. If I was running a reputable pharmaceuticals campaign I’d concentrate on getting a few really trusted links from trade bodies and suppliers then use something low risk like quality article distribution to increase link volume and improve anchor text.

Ok I feel like I’m just scratching the surface with this post, I could talk for days about researching, planning campaigns and the tactics to use but I’ve got to go build some links now:-)

A short while ago I was working with a clients site which got hacked and subsequntly penialised by google with the dreaded malware distribution warning. The following is my account of how we dealt with the issue and my advice to anyone who finds themself responsible for a site with a similar problem.

In this case the cause of the malware warning was a hack which exploited a wordpress vulnerability so I guess the first lesson here is if you’re usig wordpress or any other open source software to run your site make sure you’ve got the latest security updates in place. In this case I think this would have prevented some future headaches.

Anyway so I’m also assuming that if you’re reading this, like my client your site was distributing malware inadvertedly. If you’re doing it on purpose I’m not sure what you can do, maybe stop, or get better at it!

Image from: http://blog.johnath.com/images/malware-warning.png

Locate the problem with Google Webmaster Tools

First thing to do if you’re not already- register with Google Webmaster tools and get verified. This is the only way to get the malware warning lifted and get your site back in the index.

So the first we knew about the problem was conducting some searches for the clients main keywords and finding their listing accompanied by the ‘this site may harm your computer’ message. If you get this message the first thing you want to do is login to your google webmaster account- you should see a message here which will tell you more about the source of the problem, including the infected pages.

Actually I think if you’re a verified webmaster you should get an email telling you about the problem. For whatever reason we didn’t receive this email. I guess the advice connected to this would be to ensure the email address associated with your webmaster account is your main address so you receive these notifications.

Image from: http://www.cogzidel.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/google-webmaster-tools.png

Removal

Right, so the first thing you need to do is remove the source of the problem. In this case it was simply a matter of removing an iframe which linked to a malicious site. This is quite a common problem. The other one to look out for are hidden links and redirects to dodgy sites which are popular with hackers.

It’s important you remove the malicious code from the entire site, not just the page which webmaster tools is telling you about. As far as I can tell the webmaster console will only tell you about problems with the first page Google finds. If you clean up this page only, chances are Google will find more problems when they revisit. The trick here is getting rid of all the problems first time to avoid having to go through multiple review requests.

Request a review

Once you’re sure you’ve got rid of all the malware problems/ malicious code you can request a review by Google through the webmaster console.

It’s hard to know whether these reviews are actually checked by humans or robots but I think it’s worth crafting an intelligent message to go with your review just in case someones actually reading it. I would include the following:

• What happened to cause the problem
• What you’ve done about it
• What you’d done to ensure it doesn’t happen again
• Mention if you’re an adwords customer

In my own experience the first review took about 12 hours. The developers missed some of the malicious code and we had to go through a second review, meaning the whole process ended up taking about 36 hours before the warning was lifted from the site. If we got rid of all the malware in he first place it would have been sorted in 12. I’ve since heard others who had similar problems having the malware warning lifted in about 3 hours. Maybe Google are getting faster at it.

What else can you do?

If you’re running adwords it might be worth asking your account manager to put on a word for you. We did this in this case and who knows it might have sped things up. We had to pause the Adwords campaigns associated with the site which prehaps incentivised Google to get the site cleared (although adwords links aren’t actully effected by the malware warning).