Exchanging links is decidedly unfashionable in SEO circles and yet it’s the first thing most new sites do when they launch so who’s right? The answer is that getting some decent incoming links from similar sites is a good thing, even if you have to exchange links to get them.
Having a list of 20 or so sites on a links page and getting reciprocal links is going to help your rankings in most industries so don’t be worried about it. The key is to make sure you don’t exchange links with sites that have hundreds of reciprocal links as they won’t be passing link juice.
Once you have done your 20 exchanges you need to stop and think about new ways to generate links from similar sites. One of my favourite methods is to exchange links within news articles or blog posts. Sometimes I write about a blog a few times and they link to me a few weeks later from another post but the process can be more specific. For example the companies could agree that they link to the other site in alternate weeks and always use some helpful anchor text.
Google sees these links as highly valuable and as long as you don’t abuse the system they will count and help your rankings.
The power of just one trusted link has often been discussed but isn’t often proved. Normally any site that has one trusted link also has lots of others so you can never really tell which links are passing the most weight.
TV stars Richard & Judy have their own wine club that ranks very well on Google for the term “Buy wine“, the site was launched in 2005 and has just 56 links according to Yahoo. A number of the links are nofollow from Wikipedia and most are from Channel4.com. Apart from the Channel4.com links there are only about 5 others so we can be sure that their rankings are based almost entirely on link weight from Channel4.
In fact the term “buy” isn’t even on their homepage and the site still ranks for “buy wine”.
One of the hardest things about natural linkbuilding is trying to build links to sites about escorts, viagra, loans and insurance. My favourite method is to think outside the box and try to set up clean versions of the site (or even seperate sites) so that people are happy to link to them.
For example to rank an escorts site highly you would create a site about Ford Escorts and become part of the car community exchanging links and writing useful articles to attract natural links. After a year or two you can redirect traffic to your real site and take advantage of the anchor text and links from trusted sites that your competitors can’t get. (Continue Reading…)
Building links is hard work but there are a few tips you can use to make it a bit easier.
My favourite is to try and become a personality in your niche and encourage people to link to your site when they mention your name. For example if I was to speak at a conference people would probably link to me and say “Patrick Altoft” said xyz. Most e-commerce sites don’t have this advantage and they lose out because of it. (Continue Reading…)
As somebody always on the lookout for new and interesting clients one of the lines I hear time and time again is “we already have a SEO company and we are quite happy with them”. Is everybody ranking number 1 all of a sudden?
I see companies ranking on page 3 for their main keywords who are quite happy with the service they are getting. My advice to them is that whatever service they might be paying for is the wrong one. (Continue Reading…)
Blogging about SEO seems to be the “in thing” over the last 12 months. Hundreds of SEO and make money online blogs have sprung up offering tips on how to get more traffic.
The problem is that 90% of them offer very bad tips (the other 10% of them are mostly excellent). Why do people who don’t know much about SEO decide to start blogging about it? (Continue Reading…)
With Google clamping down on link buying maybe 2008 is the year you clean up your link profile. The problem is that sometimes it’s almost impossible to figure out what to do, especially if you think you might have been given a link buying penalty.
The first step would be to contact any link brokers you use and ask them to remove all the paid links that you think could be spotted by Google. My guess is that if you are really worried the best thing is to only buy links from inside the content of legitimate sites but the number of links you remove would be your call. (Continue Reading…)
Apparently Microsoft might be buying Yahoo, a move that would have quite a big effect on SEO.
If the deal goes through then Microsoft is likely to pool the search algorithms and create something that can really rival Google. They would have a ready made market share and could pose a threat over the long term. In the UK I don’t think anybody would notice because Google is too far ahead but in the US the effect would be much larger. (Continue Reading…)
Apparently Google.com is using a stronger geo targeting filter this week causing some people to gain much more traffic and some people to lose a lot.
In the UK Google.com has a 15% market share compared to the 75% market share that Google.co.uk has so it could be quite a big issue for some UK websites. Personally I’m not seeing much of a change looking from here in the UK but looking on a US proxy there do seem to be less .co.uk sites ranking well.
Today we are faced with the news that Digg has millions more registered users despite the fact that being Dugg doesn’t send any more traffic than in the past. Perhaps most of these accounts are fake accounts or the accounts of people who get banned every month? (Continue Reading…)
