Hello Guys,

Time for another SEO roundup! How is the SEO going this week? There have been reports of a few affiliates seeing terrible drops and even rumours that Google were directly targeting affiliate marketing websites.

I’ll lay this to rest right now, it’s simply not true. There has been activity over the last few weeks but it’s been across the board and in retrospect, most of it is no worse than it usually is.

Keep your white hat on and make your your site is not “thin” and you’ll stand a much better chance of retaining those ranks or gaining them in the first place.

Here are my recommended reads this week.

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Top Rank Blog have this excellent list of Blog and RSS directories on their site. It’s really useful if you don’t already have a reliable list of blog directories and while these kind of sites are coming and going all the time there are plenty of strong, older ones on there.

As I’m sure you already know directory submission is not what it once was so be careful not to over-do it all at once, maybe 10-20 a week and they will be approved slowly over the next few months.

Also remember that if you are syndicating your RSS feed that you should including relevant links back to your site so that should anyone host them, you get a free back link!

That not enough? You may also want to get your RSS feeds into this list of the Top 55 RSS directories from Robin Good, it’s an older post but still really useful.

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In line with keeping your site out of that thin affiliate category here’s a post looking at avoiding being seen as a spammy site, good advice but the author didn’t really follow it himself *grin*

There is also this much more official, but much longer post from SelfSEO about avoiding the Google spam filter, it refers to the leaked Google document which around last year as well as standard spam practices which you should avoid.

If you have recently had a big hit from Google I recommend you give these a careful read, make sure you are not crossing any lines and if you are make changes, resubmit and keep on the track this time.

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We also have PubCon happening this very week in the big Ol’ USA. It’s going down in Vegas and as usual has some of the biggest speakers in the industry. Make sure you keep your eyes and ears open for the latest news coming out of PubCon, most big time SEO, SEM and Webmaster blog master will be attending so next week will probably see the blog sphere alive with talk about it.

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The only other thing to mention is that we have new blogger onboard for SEO.

Katie is one of my collegues and has been doing SEO and web development as long as me. She’s a great SEO and has her own style and approach to field so be sure to read both our posts to stay on top of all the latest tips and tricks.