All Entries Tagged With: "Link Building"

10 Factors That Determine the Value of Inbound Links

In a world where inbound links are often crucial in complimenting an on-page SEO effort, determining the value of those links can be equally important. This is especially true if you are making any kind of “investment” in those links whether that involve time, money or both.

Following is a simple checklist of what to look for in a valuable inbound link.

Win $5k in Link Building Services with “Boost Your Juice” Contest

The fine folks over at Vertical Measures are feeling very gracious these days. In fact they are giving away $5,000 in link building services to the grand prize winner of a content they are holding called “Boost Your Juice.” There’s even a 2nd place prize of $1,000 in link building services.

It’s a pretty awesome chance for a business to take advantage of Vertical Measure’s premium link building strategies, all designed to improve site visibility for choice keywords in the organic search results.

Link Building Via Blog Comments

There is absolutely nothing wrong with earning a link from a blog post you decide to comment on. In fact, if you comment often on blogs, it is a good way to increase the amount of inbound links pointing to your site’s pages. However, there is a “right” way and a “wrong” way to go about accomplishing this.

Do You Report Paid Links? What Goes Around Comes Around!

I could have also placed “people that live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” in the title of this post. The question is, “Are you a search marketer that reports paid links?” Your answer would be either a definite yes, a definite no, or a sometimes, but for competing sites. Patrick Altoft asked the same question in a post at Blogstorm and admitted that he had reported them in the past, but only when the site buying or selling them was a direct competitor and ranked higher than him.

Trading In My White Hat For a Black One

While I did not expect much in the way of news here in the U.S. due to the Thanksgiving holiday, it appears that Google took the opportunity to update their web master guidelines regarding paid links. The changes essentially reveal that buying or selling links that pass PageRank can penalize a site not only in its Google Toolbar PageRank status, but also in Google search results. What does this mean for those that consider themselves “white hat SEOs?” Better go shopping for a new hat – a nice black one.

Sites Selling Text Links Get Google-Slapped, Should They Worry?

It is all over the blogosphere – sites known for selling text link ads or Google PageRank have been slapped with a PageRank reduction for their own sites by the almighty Google itself. Is this a worldwide PR update with a possible algorithm change or is it more along the line of a hand job? Seeing that a couple of sites we launched several months ago are still at a “0″ PageRank, even though they have a good amount of links pointing to them, I’d have to say the latter. The question that remains to be answered is, “should publishers and those buying links be worried?”

Guidelines for Link Building With Blog Reviews

Loren Baker has put together some guidelines in using blog reviews as an effective link building tactic. What I like best about Loren’s post is that he provides sound advice without revealing any specifics such as blogs that sell reviews or even companies that actually provide this as a service. With the war that Google has waged against paid links, it is comforting to see posts such as these that provide useful information without helping Google to identify those who are buying or selling the reviews. It fits right in with my previous plea for the entire paid links industry to go underground.

The Paid Links Industry Needs To Go Underground

If Danny Sullivan’s report over the weekend that Google is in fact reducing the PageRank for sites that are suspected of selling paid links isn’t enough to send the entire paid links industry underground, then I don’t know what is. Add to this the storm of controversy that recently occurred over Rand Fishkin outing sites that sell paid links. Now I don’t sell paid links for the sake of ranking better in the organic search results, however, as one who buys paid links for client sites, I have been a proponent for some time now of the entire industry, those who buy links, those who sell them and everyone in between, working to make it more difficult for Google and other search engines to identify paid link strategies. Currently we are making their job way to easy.

SEO Myth: All Reciprocal Links Are Bad

We are having a discussion over at Small Business Ideas Forum where Dale King starts things of by questioning the effectiveness of reciprocal linking tactics. He basically says that once upon a time, reciprocal links were one of the number one ways webmasters acquired links from other sites. However, in current times, reciprocal links have been greatly devalued by the search engines, at least as far as helping a SEO effort. So are reciprocal links a thing of the past? Should webmasters avoid them like the plague? I would say that it really depends on the “type” of reciprocal link.

Things That Bug Me Regarding Those Who Sell Links

Don’t let the title fool you – I’m not against buying links. In fact I buy them quite often for clients. However I am frustrated time and time again when searching for good links. I find a great site in which there is an opportunity to buy a paid link but am scared off for one reason or another. Here is a rant of sorts as I list several things that bug me regarding those who sell links.