I came across a website that actually has SEO valentine’s cards. The site is lacking in design, and it looks like they haven’t done anything on it since 2007, but the cards are very humorous!

The service allows you to forge the sender, so I spoofed an email to a SEO buddy. I setup the ecard to be from his wife and he did receive it. However, if you do this make sure you spell your friend’s wife’s name correctly or he will throw it into his spam folder Ü.

A few days ago I wrote about how you can redirect bad backlinks pointing to your website. Of course, this tactic is only helpful if you know what links are pointing to your website. Below is a list of websites that assist in displaying your backlink landscape. There are quite a few to choose from, but ultimately it just comes down to finding the one that best suits you.

One thing to consider when using these backlink tools is that most of them (with the exception of seomoz) use Yahoo’s search results. This is important, since Yahoo only shows your website’s first thousand backlinks. Usually, this isn’t a big deal, because many websites don’t have that many backlinks. However, as your site grows you will hopefully go over the thousand limit. If you want to take your backlink strategy more seriously I recommend looking at the paid backlink tools in helping you stay on top of your backlink game!

In the meantime, the below tools will help you get started on your seo backlinking efforts. If you know other backlink checking websites/tools let me know and I will add them to the list. ~Paul W.

An important element in ranking in Google is having other websites linking to your website. Simple enough, right? So simple that Google has written algorithms that try to penalize people for gaming their system.

If you gain too many “backlinks,” too soon; have lots of spammy backlinks; or both; you can trigger the penalty algorithms. These algos will assassinate your website and leave it in the land of the domain dead. You will no longer exist to the hundreds of millions of Google searchers.

The problem with these deadly algos, is that your competitors can “build” massive spammy links to your website, and potentially get you banned. Google denies this as possible, but I believe this to be a pernicious lie. I’ve seen first hand (but not by my hand) sites receiving the death ray of backlinks from their competitors and shortly after being penalized.

link-building Obviously, backlinks are important to a site’s ranking. However, you may find that keeping track of all the backlinks you get becomes quite a chore! In fact, I sent an email to my programming friend to create a software to track backlinks. Yet, I lucked out because recently, a friend of mine passed on a free link tracking software, called Backlink Reporter.

Several of the nice features of Backlink Reporter is that it allows you to keep track of all of the backlinks you have acquired for one or several websites. It also helps you quickly discover which links you previously had that are no longer linking to your site. Obviously, no one buys links , but if they did this tool is great in making sure that they are getting the links paid for.

The nice feature that sold me was that it also tracks the page rank of the backlink. As stated in a previous blog, don’t let the “gurus” fool you, page rank still is a good metric on the power you will be receiving from a backlink.

backlinks03jpg Have you ever wondered what the web would be if it was run by lawyers? Nah, me neither, but I received a tiny glimpse of what it might look like when a friend emailed me Advanstar’s Terms of Use for Linking. My friend wanted to be sure that her company was compliant to Advanstar’s Gestapo like terms.

At first, I thought my friend was kidding. Then I read Advanstar’s terms. My favorite is:

“Advanstar may at any time, in its sole discretion, without cause, revoke your right to link to any pages on this Site. In such event upon request, you agree to immediately remove all links to this Site”