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Would you recognize a spam link if you saw it? They’re not that hard to notice really. I can spot one from a mile away.

Typically, bloggers who write blogs for popular search terms will receive an e-mail that goes something like this:

Hi,

Thanks for replying. I am interested in permanent placement of paragraphs on specific pages of your website. Paragraphs will be custom written and according to the content of your site.

So, I can offer you: USD 15 for each of the following pages.

This is a verbatim message I received from a spam link buyer for a website that I personally own. Below these paragraphs were a set of links to the pages this link buyer wanted to place his links on followed by, in case I couldn’t do the math, a total that he would pay for those links. I found it interesting that three of those links were for pages that I wouldn’t consider selling links for under any circumstances no matter what the price - I figured that would be obvious by the content.

1. The first page was to my e-zine opt-in page. Now why would any idiot sell links on a page where he wants to take opt-ins for his newsletter? That would defeat the entire purpose for that page. And the spam link buyer wanted his links on that page permanently. Yeah, I’m a moron. NOT!
2. The second page was a sales letter for a book that I wrote. This is a no-brainer. What used car salesman is going to take $50 to tell every customer he meets, “Go across the street; they sell more cars than we do?” Again, do I have Stupid written all over my website? Nope. Hit the next guy, Chump!
3. The third page the spam link buyer wanted me to pimp out was to a book review page. This is a page I use to write book reviews for books I like. After I praise or trash the book, I tell my readers where they can go to purchase the book. Obviously, the desired result is that they will purchase the books. Though I don’t make any money on some of them, there are books that I review where I get a commission from each sale because I’m a member of an affiliate program. Why would I lead potential customers to another website for a one-time sale?

Because this brave spam link buyer was batting .500, which isn’t bad for a major leaguer, I decided to offer him the courtesy of a response. So I told him under what circumstances I’d consider selling a link. (I really have no problem selling links, but I HAVE A BIG PROBLEM with selling spam links, as you will soon see).

My response to the Mr. Spam Link Buyer went like this:

William,

I appreciate your offer, but there are several problems with the way you have presented this. No. 1, links on three of those pages are not for sell at all. A careful review of the (Page 1), (Page 2), and (Page 3) pages will show that it would be counterproductive for me to sell links on those pages.

Secondly, I believe I could sell links on my website for much more than $15 permanent placement. It is likely that I could get $5-$10 per month per page on those pages for the right website. Then you would have to be clear about what the benefits are that you are paying for. If you are looking for PageRank transference, it is out of the question. Links would have to be nofollow links. The traffic alone would be worth it to you.

Thirdly, the links on your pages look spammy (he had the nerve to include examples of what he was talking about with his paid link scheme). I won’t involve myself in that at all. I don’t encourage more than one link per paragraph in most online content and I only link out from my website if there is a clear value to my visitors in me doing so. I would have to evaluate the content on the pages you want to link to in order to see if it would provide any value to my readers.

Finally, I would feel more comfortable with the arrangement if you provided me your anchor text and let me write the content. If I like the pages you are linking to then I will write the content to encourage my visitors to link to your site. If I don’t like it then the deal is off. I won’t recommend something just to make a dollar. I have over 20 years writing experience including academic writing, journalism, sales material, and I currently work full-time as an Internet marketer, blog ghostwriter, article writer, and SEO content writer so I can back up what I say.

Alternatively, if you want to work something out for my (deleted) blog at (deleted) then I might be more amenable to that. The price would be less there because it doesn’t have the same level of traffic as the website. But some of the same demands would be in place (though I’ll be more flexible in certain ways). Again, if I like your content then I can
offer you other benefits. But if I wouldn’t freely link to your content without you paying for it then I likely wouldn’t link to it if you do pay. That’s how I see paid link value and if you are still interested then let me know what pages you want me to link to and your anchor text then we’ll go from there.

I thought that was pretty straightforward and doggone clear. Mr. Spam Link Buyer, however, didn’t respond to any of the points. Instead, he simply responded

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. I can adjust the travel keyword link vacations with informative and non spammy links, if you think you can go ahead with this just let me know.

In other words, he wanted to put travel links on my non-travel related website. Why?

The idea behind paid links is to get additional traffic and inbound links with PageRank value (though Google frowns on the practice for the purpose of PR value). I think traffic value is a lot better than PR value even if you have a PR of 8 or 9. If your PR is that high then you probably have lots of traffic as well. But that’s why I won’t sell links for PR. I will sell them for traffic. But that is a digression.

In order to make paid links work to their best advantage for you and for your customer, the links should be to a site that is relevant in terms of content. In other words, travel sites should link to travel sites, real estate sites to real estate sites, etc. Why put travel links on your real estate site? Unless the travel site you are linking to is local to you and provides real benefit to your website visitors it just doesn’t make sense.

If a reader can go to your website and tell a marked difference in the tone, voice, quality of writing, and subject matter from one paragraph to another on the same page then you have a credibility problem. How much is it worth to you to ruin your credibility? Well, that’s what spam links do for you.

Sunday, Blog Content Provider talked a little bit about link strategy among network blogs. I want to elaborate a little more on that subject today. Specifically, I’ll quote a paragraph from our post that day:

Circle jerks, where you have blog a link to blog b that links to blog c that links to blog d and blog d links to blog a won’t work anymore either.

At one time, that was a popular linking strategy. I wouldn’t try it today. The circle jerk strategy came about as a way to circumvent Google’s reciprocal link algorithm. Because reciprocal links are not considered as valuable as one-way links, webmasters invented the the three-way link. Site A links to Site B, which links to Site C. Over time, that got a little more complicated and soon you had circle jerks that consisted of 15 or 20 sites. Well, Google has figured out the game and changed its algorithms to stop that from happening. Surprised?

Don’t be. It’s not the first time and it likely won’t be the last. But there is another type of funky link strategy that you don’t want to try any more and it’s for the same reason. Let’s make it simply by taking six websites lettered from A to F and I’ll illustrate the web-structured link pattern.

• Site A links to Sites B, D, and F
• Site B links to Sites C and E
• Site C links to Sites A, D, and F
• Site D links to Sites B and E
• Site E links to Site A
• Site F links to Sites B, D, and E

Let’s further complicate this by saying that none of the sites are related to each other in content or subject matter. The only thing holding them together is that they are owned by the same person or group of persons. You might as well just get rid of all of these links because they won’t help you, and they might even hurt you in the long run.

The reason is because Google is placing even more importance on relevance with its latest (re: last week) PageRank update. Over the last few months, I’ve noticed fewer and fewer links from some blogs that I own and that are a part of NameCritic’s network were being counted in my link popularity numbers from Google. I became suspicious at the beginning of the summer when I saw links that before were counted and then weren’t. My suspicions proved correct. Google was discounting these links from non-relevant sites with higher PR on the basis of their non-relevance.

What that means on a practical level is that you should link your blog only to other relevant blogs with similar content, or your own website. The practice of linking blogs that are owned by the same person or network of persons isn’t going to be allowed. That means it’s time to get creative, and I mean really creative, with your link patterns.

Well, Google finally came through with a page rank update for the Google Toolbar. Not everyone is happy with the update, but that is pretty much true with every google page rank update.

People work hard on their blogs and websites. They read Matt Cutts’ blog. They read the Google blog. And they read everything people are saying about how to get ranked well in Google. They are paying attention to Google.

So when Google does a page rank update, they expect good results from all of their hard work and studying. Inevitably some are happy and some aren’t after an update.

This time around paid links and websites that sell them took a hit. But so did blogs that appeared to be networking their links and groups of blogs that each pretty much have the same exact blogroll.

How do you decide who you will link to? It used to seem as if the low value of reciprocal links didn’t apply to your blogroll. This last update has me convinced that if you are trading links with other blogs, then they are definitely being treated as reciprocal links now even if they weren’t before.

Circle jerks, where you have blog a link to blog b that links to blog c that links to blog d and blog d links to blog a won’t work anymore either.

Google is looking for links they know are relevant to your content and links that were not achieved in any unnatural way.

They won’t get it right all the time and some legitimate blogs will suffer a drop in google page rank even though they do everything right.

So don’t panic. Just keep building real one-way inbound links to your blog and watch that you only link to blogs and websites that really are related to your content.

A very simple strategy for building more inbound links and getting new traffic to your blog is a thing called trackback. A trackback is a blog post that you actually make on your blog. But instead of just writing a post and publishing it in a vacuum, you trackback to another blog, which causes your blog post to appear as a comment on the other blog and links back to your blog.

Usually, your trackback comment on the other blog will appear as a paragraph or three or four lines of text. If readers want to read the entire comment then they have to click on the link to visit your blog. Then they can read your entire blog post. The other blogger benefits because the trackback links to their blog from yours and they get additional content on their page, giving them - and you - SEO benefits.

I like trackbacking because it usually drives additional traffic to your blog. These are readers you likely will not get any other way. But you have to keep a few things in mind about trackbacking before you do it:

• Don’t do it too often
• Make sure your comments are relevant to the blog you trackback to
• Make useful comments that will prove valuable to others
• Be interesting
• Don’t just do it for the link

How Often Is Too Often?

If you trackback to the same blog every day then that’s too often. I’d say don’t trackback to the same blog more than you have to. If you constantly trackback then people will get tired of seeing your posts and just ignore them. Moderation is in order here.

Make Relevant Trackback Comments

Don’t trackback to a blog about mechanics from a blog about flower arrangements unless your blog post is specifically relevant to the specific blog post at the mechanic’s blog. In other words, as a for instance, if the mechanic posted a blog about sending his wife flowers for her birthday by having the florist deliver them to the mechanic’s shop and place them in the driver’s seat so she would not miss them then you can trackback from your florist’s blog. Otherwise, don’t just make a bunch of irrelevant trackbacks.

Use And Valuable Trackback Comments

What is a useful and valuable comment? It’s one that others can benefit from. The benefit can be emotional or serious. It can make them laugh or cry (good tears). But it must convey some information that they would find useful. Otherwise, it will be considered spam and might get deleted by the other blogger.

Be Interesting

In other words, don’t be boring. Make interesting comments that people will respect. They want to like you. Give them good reasons to.

Don’t Just Trackback For The Link

Link juice is good. But link juice for the sake of link juice is spam. It annoys people. If you make useful, valuable, and interesting comments then your trackbacks will be received more cheerily. People will like you and they’ll return the favor.

This chart shows the erratic link popularity of the News and Media Blog. This blog is a blog written by me for NameCritic. I will tell you in a minute why I’m showing you this, but first I want to define link popularity.

Link popularity is the rating the search engines give you for your inbound links. Whenever an inbound link is created for your website - that is, when another website links to you - then the search engines count that toward your link popularity. Your total link popularity is a cumulative of all of the link popularity from each of the search engines.

Fluctuation in your link popularity is natural. Older links will disappear after a period of time. That’s why it is important to always work on building links. Another thing that affects link popularity are changes in search engine algorithms. Whenever the search engines change the criteria for counting links, any older links that do not meet the new criteria will be discounted so if you have a lot of those types of links then you’ll see a drop in link popularity.

How Link Popularity Is Counted

Take a look at the chart and you’ll see the last drop in link popularity for the News and Media Blog. It isn’t as sharp as the one before it. That one took the plunge. But the curious thing about this drop is that it took place right at the time we decided to start posting to the blog every other day instead of our usual every day posting pattern. It’s interesting that this event caused our link popularity to slip. I think, rather, that it caused our link popularity to slow down some, but it shouldn’t have caused our link popularity to fall off since link popularity measures links you have built up, not those that you will build in the future.

Nevertheless, drop nothwithstanding, you want to post to your blog every day. It not only affects your link popularity - and the link popularity of any sites you link to from your blog - but it also affects your search engine saturation. But that’s a different blog post.

Professional Management for Business Blogs
Business Blogging
SEO, Content, and Link Building Stategies that work

If you’re building a website of any kind, you need link popularity. Link popularity is simply the count of the number inbound links pointing to your website. It’s important in determining your website’s PageRank, a gauge of respectability and trust online.

But how do you build the link popularity that makes you rise in the search engines?

There are several ways. Here are just a few:

• Article Marketing
• Link Reciprocity
• Link Purchasing
• Social Networking
• Blogging

Why Link Baiting Is Risky

You could, of course, build a website and hope that other webmasters like it well enough to link to you. But that is an unreliable method for a few reasons:

• You can’t force webmasters to link to you
• To get webmasters to link to you voluntarily you’ll have to provide them with maximum benefit, which is possible but unless you are the top-notch in your industry and you know it this is not as reliable as some people would have you believe
• Some webmasters will not link to you no matter how much quality content you have unless you link back to them and you should know that reciprocal links aren’t as valuable as one-way links so that would defeat the purpose (NOTE: I’m not saying reciprocal links are bad, just not as valuable as one-way links)

One way links are more valuable than reciprocal links, so I recommend reciprocal links only as necessary. Some people say never use reciprocating links, but I think reciprocal links are good for building traffic so use them with discretion.

How Your Blog Builds Link Popularity

One way you can effectively build link popularity is with your blog. Set up a blog on a separate domain name from your website and make sure it is evident that there is a relevance connection between the two. You don’t want to rely on this method alone, but by placing sidebar links on your blog that link to relevant web pages on your website, you’ll build link popularity to your website with every blog post.

Here’s how it works:

• Each blog post is a single page in the search engines
• Every time you link from your blog post to your website you are building a one-way link
• If the blog is on your domain name, links to your website will benefit you more at Yahoo and MSN
• If the blog is on a separate domain name, links to your website will benefit you at all of the search engines

There are other ways to build link popularity through your off site business blog, but I’ll save those for another blog post.

Professional Management for Business Blogs
Article Marketing Blog
SEO Service Provider Blog
Business Blogging

This is an article I wrote awhile back, but still applies and I hope will be useful to you. Something that is overlooked a lot is blog pageviews.

It’s great to get a good search engine listing for your blog post and it’s great that people come and read your new blog post and possibly even comment on it.

But what about those users who just found your blog for the first time? They don’t know about all the other great stuff you posted in your blog before. Are you doing enough to keep them on your blog long enough to read more than just today’s blog post?

10 Ways to Increase Your Blog’s Pageviewsby Chris McElroy aka NameCritic

With Google Adsense or Yahoo Publisher, having people click onto more pages helps your revenue immensely, but how do you get them to read more than one page when they visit your website? Here are a few tips.

1. Create pages within the blog that contain reference material you refer to often in your posts. These static pages will also get crawled and indexed by the search engines and as you write posts about your topics you can refer people to these static pages as references to what you are posting about.

2. Use articles as static pages. You can reprint articles on any topic for free by visiting one of the many article directories like http://www.articlecontentprovider.com/articlesubmit/ Then refer people to read the articles that relate to the post you are making. You could even add one article as a new page every time you make a post.

3. Refer to other posts you have made on your blog or on another one of your blogs while posting. This gets the reader to click over to previous posts. You can even decide your posts by browsing previous posts and deciding which one to follow up on. Those archives are not to be lost and forgotten. Its great material, (you wrote it right?), so use it.

4. Create a page that links to your favorite posts that are timeless. You browse your old posts, find posts that you want readers to find easily, then build a links page with those posts directly linked. Then add a link to that page from your front page. Call it favorite posts or whatever and you will benefit by those that click through and follow those links.

5. Use the “more” tag. You write your post as normal, then decide where you want to break the post up onto a new page. You put the more tag in and readers have to click to a new page to read the rest of the story.

6. Write once per week special projects. These are a series of articles on a particular topic. You will be offering it once per week giving readers a week to comment on it, then have them hanging on for next weeks special post in the series. Each time add links to previous posts in that series.

7. Using your content from your other websites or blogs is also a great way to get more pageviews for all of them. Use the target new tag and refer to material on your other blogs and websites. It will open a new window leaving the current blog open while they visit your other website or blog. You can quickly double up your pageviews while also introducing your readers to your other websites and blogs.

8. Make a list of 10 previous posts and the links to those posts. Make a post in your blog about 10 things you want your readers to know and read in case they have not done so before. At your suggestion they will at least go see if they have read those posts before, increasing your pageviews once again plus bringing old material to new readers. That also lets them know they should browse the archives for things they have missed.

9. Using that same list of 10 posts or a new one and visit other blogs on your topic. Find posts that talk about something similar to one of those 10 posts, then instead of adding a link in your signature to the home page, make a comment there and refer to the post that is similar and that contains helpful information to that blogger and their readers. You will also be increasing your link popularity while doing this. Do not spam the link. Make sure it actually contains useful information. Don’t be trolls or spammers and you will end up with new readers and more page views for your blog.

10. Do not stop being creative. Use the tips in this article, plus invent some of your own ways to interlink your blogposts together. Create pages. Don’t just post and forget. That content is valuable, use it. Do not make people search your blog. They are lazy and busy. Bring it to them. That is just good customer service.

I hope this article helps you learn there is more to blogging than just writing a post once in awhile or even daily. If you employ the tips I just gave you into your blog I guarantee you will increase your pageviews which in turn will increase your revenue if using an ad program in your blog.

Professional Management for Business Blogs
Article Marketing Blog
SEO Service Provider Blog
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