Google has automatic filters to adjust site’s SERPs according to its behaviour.

By behaviour I mean three things: site content, on-page and off-page optimisation.
Experienced SEOs say there are hundreds of such filters, but Google never officially announced them, nor even claimed their existence. Because of that, the filters’ performance is determined on a purely empirical basis and their names vary a lot according to personal tastes of people who coin them.

Despite various gossips and uncertainties, there are a few filters that have  more or less proven their existence and are widely recognised by many SEO’s and webmasters.
A good (though rather speculative) review of Google filters is given in this blog post.

In this article I will mention only 4 (most prominent, on my opinion) Google filters:

• Google Sandbox filter
• Google -N filter
• Google overoptimisation filter
• Google duplicate content filter

Strictly speaking, even that major categorisation above is logically incorrect, as you can’t compare apples with horses. What on Earth am I talking about?! Well, it’s simple: there are filters classified by what they do and filters classified by what they are for. If we accept that classification, then there are actually only  two kind of filters:

• “Stay in the basement” and
• “Go down by so many floors”

What I mean is this: some filters (like Google Sandbox, e.g.) do not allow your site to climb anywhere to be visible in SERPs. Most frequently this means 200th or even 600th position in SERPs for your targeted keywords. The other kind of filters make your site drop in rankings by N positions . Most frequent are -30, -60 and -950 penalties, however there is a whole range of other “-N” Google filters or penalties.

What are Google Filters for?

I believe that all thinkable reasons for Google Filters or Penalties can be summarised by 5 major factors:

• Low Trust Rank (a new site or site linking out to spam/dodgy sites like those advertising porn, casino, pharmacy, using link farms, doorways or other “black-hat” methods)
• On-page overoptimisation (keyword, heading and meta tag stuffing)
• Duplicate content issues (either copied from other sites of due to dynamically formed pages that strongly overlap in content with each other)
• Off-page overoptimisation (reckless link-building policy: spikes in link building rate; heavily overused anchor text, paid links etc.)
• Server performance (slow page loading, long and frequent outages)

How to lift Google filters?

Plianly speaking, you have to remove the cause that triggered the filter in the first place.  Let me just list the most important Do’s and Don’ts that will help you to avoid or remove a Google filter:

• Don’t do keyword or meta tag stuffing; texts should read naturally
• Avoid copying and pasting other’s content
• Remove or no-follow pages with duplicate content (this could be quite an issue on blogs, where the same posts appear on different pages sorted by categories, tags, in archives etc.)
• Build you links steadily over time; avoid sudden spikes in link popularity
• Do not link out to spam sites or sites that link to spam (in particular - adult, gambling, pharmacy and other dubious quality sites)
• Don’t engage in any “black-hat” activity (doorways, link farms, cloaking etc.)
• Use a quality hosting provider that offer  high performance fast servers with short and infrequent outages (performance stats on any host are publicly available, just search Google)
• Try to acquire (by link-bait, negotiation etc.) links from topically-related trustworthy sites that are SERP leaders in their area.

SEO siloing is simply structuring and interlinking a website content that allows to noticeably improve your site’s rankings.

This is one of the most advanced strategies of on-page optimisation.

Briefly, you structure your website as follows:

Category

• Subcategory
  • Article 1
  • Article 2
  • ………..
  • Article N

Each Category/Subcategory page should contain the list of all posts in this Category/Subcategory.

Each Article should link back to Category and Subcategory, to which it belongs, and other posts in the same  Category and Subcategory, but avoid linking to posts and subcategories in other categories. Confusing?

Let’s consider an example.  On this Blog I have Category Google, which contains a number of subcategories:

• Google News
• Google Search
• Google Tools
• Google Trends

If I click on the menu Item Google - it will give me all posts in all subcategories of category Google. Here, every post links back to the main Category (Google) and to its parent subcategory (e.g., Google News). It doesn’t link to any subcategories belonging to categories other than Google (unless, of course, the post belongs to several categories simultaneously *).

Also, if I click on any subcategory (e.g., Google News), it will give me only posts related to this subcategory and nothing else. Here, all posts link back to both the Google News (main subcategory) and to Google (Category) and link to all other posts in category Google, but don’t link out anywhere else **).

How do I achieve automatic SEO siloing?

There are several ways to do it. One is just to install the SEO siloing plugin. However, at the time of writing the plugin developer has not been answering in the topic for over a year and the latest version of plugin worked only for WP2.5. So if you have a newer version of Wordpress, the plugin may not operate correctly.

Therefore, to be on the safe side, I suggest another way.
You install the following plugins:

• MenuBar
• sCategory Permalink
• Similarity

Using the Menubar you make a multi-level Menu for your Blog (Categories with Subcategories - like you see on my blog) using the wpm-Suckerfish.zip template. Then by editing each post, you assign a main category to all your posts that belong to more than one category or subcategory (for other posts do nothing!).This option is empowered by the sCategory Permalink plugin.

Make sure that for each post you tick boxes next to both it’s category and the main subcategory, whereas  the radio button is only selected next to the main subcategory. For example, for my post Google Wave - a new Era in Online Communication, whose main subcategory is Google News and additional one is SEO News, I choose the following settings:

For more details see the website for sCategory Permalink plugin.

And finally, you choose the following settings for the Similarity plugin:

Make sure that you set the Auto-display list from option into sim_by_cat mode  - this is important to avoid linking out (and thus loosing link juice) to posts in other categories.

That’s it, you are done! You blog now has a SEO Silo structure and the rankings for keywords that are in the category/subcategory titles should start improving.

Help your rankings with deep links

The last and very important thing to do - is to acquire a few deep links pointing to each of  the article pages. Of course, these deep links should have keyword(s) in the anchor text, for which the category, subcategory and the post are being optimised.

The easiest and the cheapest way to acquire deep links is to comment on dofollow blogs. You can get free lists of dofollow blogs on the Internet, but most of those lists are crap: they are out of date, most of  blogs in the list are in reality nofollow or has been converted back to nofollow, and , what is worst, nearly all of them have many tens or even hundreds of comments, which makes backlinks from them completely worthless.

Fortunately, there is a great solution to the problem - a software called Fast blog finder.  It has both Free version and Gold version.  With free version you can scan up to 50 blogs for one keyword; however, only 5-10% of those are usually dofollow, so you can find something like 5-7 dofollow blogs per keyword.

That’s of course too few to build a sensible number of links on any topics. Therefore, if you want to have a never-ending source of fresh and 100% working dofollow blogs on all possible subjects, Gold version is your smartest  choice. At the time of writing it is only $49 and has been my best investment in software over the last several years.

Footnotes:

*) In fact, this is an exception, which is no good for ranking; so, whenever possible, you should either avoid multiple categories for the same post or nofollow links to all the categories but the main one.

Standard Wordpress blog doesn’t allow you to choose that, but rather sets the category with the smallest ID to be the main one, which is often not appropriate. Fortunately, there is a plugin sCategory Permalink that allows you to choose the main category yourself. Download and install it before you do SEO siloing on your blog.

**) Again, provided that the post belongs to only one category.

When you want to find all available information on a particular website, you can use one of the following search operators:

cache: technorati.com - displays the latest version of technorati.com in Google’s cache; in other words, it tells you when a particular web page has been last indexed by Google.  (Syntax: no space after colon!)

related: youtube.com - will give a list of all webpages on any site that are (topically) related to youtube.com. (Syntax: no space after colon!)

info:amazon.com (or id:amazon.com) - will provide all available information that Google stores on amazon.com.  (Syntax: no space after colon!)

In fact, when you type info:amazon.co.uk in search, Google will come up with the following:

Google can show you the following information for this URL:

* Show Google’s cache of amazon.co.uk
* Find web pages that are similar to amazon.co.uk
* Find web pages that link to amazon.co.uk
* Find web pages from the site amazon.co.uk
* Find web pages that contain the term “amazon.co.uk”

Actually, the items in the list correspond to the following search queries:

• cache:amazon.com
• related:amazon.com
• link:amazon.com
• site:amazon.com
• “amazon.com”

As you can see, info operator gives you the most comprehensive information about a particular webpage, including the results produced by cache and related described above. Therefore, if you memorise the syntax for  info and use it, you won’t need to remember any other operators to get a full information about any web page.

Specific Information On Any Site

Operators in this section will help you to find all web pages that contain a specific information you are looking for; not only this concerns text on those pages, but also their meta tags, URLs and even links (both internal and external).

inanchor:online games - searches for all webpages that contain links with either the words online or game (or both) in the anchor text. Those may actually be  present in different anchors. If you want them to be in the same anchor text, enclose the phrase in quotes, i.e. type inanchor:”online games”

intext:search engine optimization - will find all webpages that include either of the words search, engine or optimization in the text. Similarly, if you want all of those words to be in text of the same page, enclose the phrase in quotes.

inurl:blog monetization - finds all web documents that contain either of the words blog or monetization in the URL of the webpage. If you want them both in URL and next to each other, surround the words by quotes.

intitle:personal finance - finds all webpages that include either of the words personal or finance in the title tag. Again, if you want all words to be in the page title, enclose them in quotes.

Finally, there are similar variation of all the four operators listed above, namely:

• allinanchor
• allintext
• allinurl
• allintitle

Essentially they do the same job, except that prefix all means that all the words after colon should be present within the same anchor, page text, URL or title. Finally, if you want those word to go next to each other - enclose the phrase in quotes.

(23+ 54) - 47*5/8 - calculates result of the expression
32% of 76 - calculates  how many is 32 % of 76
3^4 or 3**4 - raise 3 to the power of 4

Unit conversion

old units in new units - this is a template for how to do conversion

500 USD in Pounds - converts 500 US dollars into British pounds

260 lbs in kg - converts weight in pounds into weight in kilos

12 inch in cm - convert 12 inches into centimeters

Travel info

London Paris - searches journey info and bookings from London to Paris  (template: cityA cityB )

LHR CDG - searches flight bookings from Heathrow airport, London to Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris. To find airport codes type city airport code (e.g., Birmingham airport code; template: airport1 airport2).

Entertainment info

book Harry Potter - finds information related to Harry Potter book. Note: Colon after book is not required. (template: book Book Name)

movie:  Forrest Gump - finds reviews, show-times and ratings for the movie “Forrest Gump” (template: movie: Movie Title)

music: Pink Floyd - find reviews about the band and its albums. (template: music: Band Name)

Restricted Search of specific info:

Football site:news.bbc.co.uk -  finds info about Football only on BBC News website.  (template: Keyword site: www.site.com)

link:www.twitter.com - finds all web pages that link to site in question (twitter). NOTE: Google does not show all links for a site, only a small part. To get more links to a site use link operator in Yahoo! (template: link: www.site.com)

Form SA100 filetype:pdf (or ext:pdf) - searches for documents with a certain name (Form SA100) and of specific type (pdf). (template: Document Name filetype:extension; extension = pdf, doc, txt, jpg etc. )

Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes 1902..1920 - finds books & articles by Arthur Conan Doyle about Sherlock Holmes written between 1902 and 1920. (template: Author Subject year1..year2)

Word Definitions:

define word, what is word, what are words - finds pages which define a word or phrase. Definitions are not necessarily strict or of a dictionary type. (E.g., define procrastination or what is procrastination)

define:word - finds more accurate definitions of a word on the Web from dictionary-like sources (online dictionaries, thesaurus, Wikipedia.  E.g., define:procrastination)

Did you know you could get much more accurate and valuable results from Google than the basic search offers?

You probably did. But I bet many of you didn’t know how.

This article explains you how.

General Advanced Search

This Google guide gives quite a comprehensive review of advanced search operators. There is no point to reiterate it here. Instead, I will rather concentrate on most interesting examples and their practical implications.

Search queries:

Exact Phrase:
“latest news” -  finds the exact phrase in the quotes. The result can be more accurate and relevant than just typing latest news without quotes.

Either This or That:
latest news OR gossips - searches for all pages that have both words latest and news simultaneously or pages that have the words latest and gossips.

This but not That:
latest news -gossips - searches for all pages that have both words latest and news simultaneously but does not have gossips. Note, there should be no space (!) before gossips.

Historical Figures:
Henry +viii England - provides info on HENRY the Eights, King of England, but exclude pages about other English Kings. Note the use of Roman numbers (i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi, vii, viii, ix, x).

When Related Words Unknown:
Latest  * SEO trends * news - *- wild-card symbol is very powerful search operator and lets you find phrases that contain unknown intermediate terms. In this example you will find pages containing

• Top Seo Trends
• SEO News & SEO Trends
• Latest SEO Trends and Metrics
• Latest SEO News, New SEO Trends

As you can see, Google try to offer best matches that expand on the query
Lates SEO trends & news.

Finding Glossaries and Definitions:
SEO ~glossary - finds glossaries and dictionaries about SEO, lists of terms and definitions.

Hyphenated Words:
Case-sensitive - finds pages with all forms of this phrase, including the hyphenated form, both of these words as a phrase or placed separately on the pages.

To be continued with parts 2 and 3…

It can be used for great many things, but the most important to me is online conferencing/group discussion, where everyone can contribute at the same time. With Google Wave you can share all kind of information from plain text to presentations, photos, videos etc. But what is more everyone can edit contributions of other group members.

Why would you need this?! Simple. Imagine you have a team of colleagues working on a collaborative project. You need to meet them quite often to discuss progress and make plans, but those people are physically remote from you most of the time. So what’s the solution? How can you meet more often and less effortlessly than travelling hundred of miles for regular meetings? And the answer is……… Waves!

You knew it’s coming, didn’t you?!

Well, it’s really the case. Google wave will allow you to run and control a collective project together with a team of people no matter how far away you are from each other. You can also communicate with your friends and family, exchanging thoughts and plans instantly.

Even if you dont’ have a computer with Internet connection, you can use your mobile or I-phone to send waves, and that you can do pretty much anywhere.

This new service is still in the development stage and will be launched later this year. The great thing about it is that it’s an open source protocol, so everyone can develop it and create new gadgets.

The link I gave you includes an 80 minutes video. You’ll probably find it a way too long to watch entirely. But if you have a patience to at least browse it, you may be rewarded with important discoveries on a personal level.

Who knows, perhaps it will become the tool No.1 for both your business and personal relations in the very near future. If so, it may be better to learn it sooner and take advantage of it while others are slowly catching up.

So what are you waiting for? - go on, take a look. I am  not tempting you, just giving you a tip. It’s a pity Google doesn’t pay me for referring its products; I think I have done a pretty good job, and all for free. Oh, what a shame!

If you are running Ads, Writing Paid Reviews or Selling Links from your blog -  it’s important to maximise your Technorati rank.

This article explains what is Technorati rank and how to improve it.

What is Technorati and its rank?

Technorati is one of the oldest and most popular Blog Search Engines, and in the blogosphere it is competing with Google and Yahoo!

Technorati regularly indexes a huge number of blogs and tracks links between them, displaying search results according to their relevance and rank.

That search engine has introduced a special blog metric called Technorati rank, which has become extremely popular in the blogosphere and is considered as a factor of prestige (similar to PageRank in Google). The Technorati rank is only applicable to blogs registered with them and depends on quantity and quality (Technorati rank) of other Technorati blogs linking to you.  The more authoritative blog  is, the lower its Technorati rank (i.e. top blogs have very low Technorati ranks).

Why is it important?

Technorati rank is important if you are placing ads, publishing sponsored reviews or selling links from your blog. Many advertising companies (PerformancingAds), product review sites (Review Me, Sponsored Reviews) and link brokers (Text Link Ads) use Technorati rank to rate your blog. This, in turn, determines your blog exposure to potential customers of these services: the better your rating, the more customers you may get.

In addition, your ratings with the aforementioned services will determine how much you are paid per a link or product review published on your site. Therefore, if you are monetising your blog in any of those ways - you want to improve your Technorati rank as much as possible to make more money of your blog.

How do I start with Technorati?

1. Claim your blog. When you register with Technorati you have to claim your blog (basically, just insert an html link to a post on your home page and press a claim button in your Technorati profile). When claiming, take time to provide relevant tags and thoughtful description to your blog, as these may affect your blog popularity.
2. Insert  photo or avatar. Add an avatar or your real photo.  Your own photo is best, as it is unique and no one else is likely to use it (unless your are a celebrity, of course ). When someone finds your blogs via Technorati search, your photo will be shown next to your blog description, which will improve its clickability and drive more traffic.

How to improve your Technorati rank?

1. Create linkable content. There is no better way to improve your blog popularity as publishing original and interesting content. If you can write yourself - great, if not - hire a decent copywriter, but great content is key to success. But only a key… Promotion of course is necessary.

2. Tag your posts. Tagging post is very important as this improves chances of your blog to be found by other Technorati bloggers. If you run a Wordpress blog, to manage tags download and install one of those plugins:

Simpletags, Easy Technorati Tags or Ultimate Tag Warrior.

3. Ping your posts. Make sure you ping your posts with pingomatic. This is an in-built feature for Wordpress and is usually activated by default. However, to be certain it really is, go to Setting –> Writing in your WP admin panel and make sure the following address is inserted into the last field on that page: http://rpc.pingomatic.com/.

4. “Fav” your blog. You can copy a Technorati Favourite badge code from your Technorati profile and insert it in your blog’s sidebar or within some posts. If your readers like your blog, they might add to it to their Technorati Favourites, thus helping you to improve the blog popularity.

5. “Fav” other Blogs.

There is, of course, the other side of the coin - you may visit other Technorati blogs and add those you liked most to your favourite. Usually quite a few of the blog owners will visit your blog (even if only to check who is liking them) and, if they find your site useful and informative,they may link back or/and add it to their Favs as well.

6. Commenting at other Technorati blogs. Another way to get links form Technorati blogs to improve your rank is to comment on those blogs. To make sure your comments are accepted, write only smart comments that add value to the post or stimulate discussion. Also, make sure the blogs you are commenting on are dofollow.

7. Buy Blog posts/reviews. Many bloggers are happy to write reviews about other blogs for quite a reasonable fee. This is a great way not only to build relevant links to your site, but also to drive some traffic. How big? Depends on the readership size of the referring blog.

However, writing a review article is not everyone’s cup of tea, but majority of bloggers are able to write simple posts, and this a good alternative to reviews.

Advanced bloggers often have a network of blogs on different topics. Contacting such bloggers for writing a paid review is a clear advantage as your review gets published at many blogs simultaneously for  a significantly reduced price per blog.  This way you are getting tens of blog posts with links to your site.

Even though such “deals”  may not that greatly improve your blog’s search engine rankings*), they will still work fine from Technorati point of view, giving you backlinks and boosting  your Technorati rank (provided, of course, that the blog owners have claimed their network at Technorati).

8. Sponsor/create a Wordpress plugin or theme.

If you are a designer or php programmer, it’s your call! You can create a free WP theme or plugin and distribute via Wordpress.org website. If your WP product proves popular and hundreds or even thousands of people will download and  install it, you will get lots of free backlinks and possibly a good traffic too.

However, creating such things is not easy, and only people with special skills can do that. But don’t worry, there is a simpler way than a need to create a WP product - you can sponsor it and get a link to your blog in return! Many WP themes and plugin producers are looking for sponsors and this is your chance to promote your blog!

Sponsoring opportunity is ready available and it should not cost a fortune. Therefore, if your are willing to spend a few hundred bucks on sponsoring someone else’s WP plugin or a Theme, this may ultimately be repaid a hundredfold with lots of backlinks and traffic earning you decent revenue!

Your Feedback

Your feedback is welcome!
Feel free to leave a comment below.

Footnotes:

*) as Google will easily crack that the blogs belong to the same owner)

It’s FREE to download, but if you value my time and effort spend on collecting and maintaining this database, I would appreciate a little donation (please use the Donate form in the sidebar). No amount is too small! It’s your decision!

Ok, here is the link to download the list:
MS Excel format - 550+ Article Submission Websites.xls
Plain text format - 550+ Article Submission Websites.txt

Note that in the Excel file there are 420+ articles marked as Auto and the rest marked as Manual.
Auto means that those article websites can be used for automatic (!) submission, which could save you a huge amount of time, but you need a dedicated software for that.
I use Allsubmitter, which is both mass submission and SEO software - all-in-one pack including 15 (!) different modules covering all aspects of SEO that a webmaster can dream of.

With Allsubmitter you can also automatically submit to web directories, comment on blogs and you won’t need any more SEO tools ever!

What is also great about it, they offer a FREE demo version, just look for the link “click here download the free demo version” at the bottom of that page.

Days of SEO as a way to manipulate site rankings are counted. SEO is dying as business

I’ll start with that bold statement for those of you who do not like long “foreplay”, and for those who want to know why? - read on.

Why do I think so?

Well, mostly because  search engines get smarter and smarter, aiming to close the gap between user queries and relevance of information. In simpler words they want users to find exactly what they are looking for, and thus search rankings become more and more user-determined.

I was about to write a full-fledged article on this when I stumbled upon this excellent post while doing my research. That post gives a great overview of the history in search engines algorithms, and how those affected SEO and thus destined its future.
The review is definitely worth reading, as this is a by far the brightest and quite comprehensive, yet,  very concise description of the search engines evolution that I have ever come across.
Basically, it can be summarised like that:

• Meta tags, keywords density, headings etc.
  
• PageRank
  
• Reciprocal links
  
• One-way links
• One-way relevant links
• How often links are clicked on
• Gathering and relying on User Data

Gosh! Looks difficult to grasp, doesn’t it?
NO worries, I will give you a hand. In the early days of Search engines, on-page factors  (Meta tags, keywords density, headings, subheadings etc.) meant a lot, and as Greg Howlett says:

It took only a few metatags and such, and within weeks, I was dominant. … That went on for years. Back in those days, a monkey could have dominated search engines rankings.

That’s very true, but those days of Wild West SEO has long gone. Then there was an obsession with link exchange (many webmasters still keep practising this as their main link building strategy), first reciprocal and later 3-way exchange. With time, however, search engines cracked down on both of these and started to give much less weight to those type of links.

Then the smart guys at Google realised that most trustworthy should be one-way links and from topically-related websites. After that it’s got more difficult to manipulate rankings, but SEOs and webmasters have overcome that challenge too by modifying their link-building policies accordingly.

But then, the folks from Big G said: “Hey, look, why don’t we let users  judge how good a website is?” And changed the algorithms to now account for how many times a link is actually clicked.

Hang on.  Do I see your wry face with a silent question “WHAT???” bursting out of your lips?..
I hate to confirm your dreadful apprehensions, but that is true. Nowadays it’s not enough just to get a link from a quality topically-related resource with High PR. For that link to prove its worthiness to search engines and pass appreciable link juice it has to be used!!!! Sure it will pass some link juice even if nobody clicks it once, but only if the link is used often, the  effect will be substantial!

And the last, but not the least: Google started to collect User Data (navigational clicks, form filling info, user’s search requests and many more) to “read” your thoughts and decide whether the sites you visit should rank well on the searched queries.

And this is only the beginning.  I think Google has finally realised a very important maxim -

It’s the user rating of a website that should determine its ranking

This way not only will search engines deliver the most relevant information to web users, they will also minimise an ability of SEOs and webmasters to manipulate search rankings, thus combating spam and ultimately killing SEO as a key to success. Obviously, to some extent SEO will still be efficient, no doubts. In particular, as long as good references in the form of backlinks matter, link popularity and trustworthiness will still influence ranking. However, in the very near future there will undoubtedly be a shift towards content-oriented websites offering regularly updated original content that resonates with the site users.

I am sure you can make conclusions by yourself,  so I’ll spare you time and abstain from preaching. Instead, I just want to quote the words for the post I mentioned earlier:

…as Google can see further into the minds of the user, the SEO smoke and mirrors becomes less effective. It means that search engine optimization as we have known it over the past decade is destined for extinction.

Nothing to add on my part. All is said. But your thoughts and comments are as usually welcome.

The answer seems not obvious and there are various gossips going around,  as if websites that have backlinks from sites in other languages are sort of “worldwide recognized” and therefore those links boost rankings.

Although the point of the “worldwide recognition” is a complete nonsense to me, I think there is some truth in the above assumption, namely -

links from sites in different language(s) do help your rankings.

What makes me think so? Well, first of all - my own experience, and secondly - logic. Practise shows that Google algorithms are so clever that they can relate translated terms in different languages. The best proof for that is when an English site is being viewed by, e.g., a visitor from France, Google AdSense ads will show up in French! This is a fact, which has been numerously verified.

So, what all that means? This suggests that Google is very likely to apply the same policy to backlinks -  it accounts for relevancy and passes link juice from a “donor” site in one  language to the recipient site in other language, effectively translating the texts and finding similar terms in both languages.

This assumption of mine is strongly supported by other SEOs and webmasters. For instance,  Loren Baker claims that

I also work with a number of  companies who target Hispanics in the United States… I’ve found that attracting links to those clients in foreign language sites, does help with rankings for relevant terms in both English and Spanish

Quite a few commenters to that post have supported the above finding by sharing their own findings which closely match those of Laren. One of them wrote:

In my experience, foreign links with a related topic and with your keyword in the anchor text will boost your SERPs in the local search engine.

Tallying up, I want to say that acquiring backlinks from sites in different languages is definitely worth the effort, provided that

• Donor sites are topically related to yours
• Backlinks come with targeted anchor texts
  
• The links are easy to get (natural links; sites accepting free or inexpensive submission; link exchange etc.)

Surely, all other requirements (Trust, Authority etc.) that apply to sites in your own language  apply to the foreign websites as well. But that is quite obvious, isn’t it?