One of my students contacted me today to ask why his site still was not getting ranked in Google. He had followed my advice a number of times in the past and achieved excellent rankings very quickly.

After considerable analysis of the the niche and keywords he was focused and and in depth review of his back links I was puzzled as to why his backlinks strategy was not working.

I am a great believer in the art of dividing and conquering to solve a problem, in my early career I was a mainframe support engineer and I spent many a night in cold data centres debugging sick mainframes that supported thousands of users and therefore the speed at which I could resolve a problem was critical. One of the techniques I was fortunate to have been taught was from a consulting firm called Kepner Tregoe. The skills I developed resulted in me adopting a very disclipined and detailed approach to problem solving.

The flexibility of the fundamental technologies and concepts that underpin the web enable you to build prototypes very quickly and I was quickly able to build an identical ‘control’ set up around a keyword with similar search volume and competition characteristics to my student’s.

True to form the ‘control’ set up worked well and ranked in a matter of days. The obvious conclusion being that my methods for building back links have not been affected by any subtle changes in Google (you should know this happens frequently…more in another set of articles).

The only thing left to do was to check each link to the student’s site. Two and half hours of studying the syntax of each backlink revealed the answer to the problem. A slash at the end of the URL!!!

Here is what I mean:

www.websitename.com is a different site to www.websitename.com/ is a totally different site as far as Google is concerned….

I discovered that a significant percentage of my students backlinks were pointing to one URL containing the slash problem and the remaining backlinks were pointing to a page without the slash.

The lesson is obvious. If you are engineering backlinks using some of the legitamite methods I share with you in my teachings. Stick to ONE format of URL when you format the link.

Thats all

Nick

Technorati Tags: backlinks - FAQ & Education

Posted in: backlinks - FAQ & Education |