Link Development

Self service linking has attained ridiculous proportions on the web as naive, ignorant and lazy webmasters look for the easiest ways to obtain as many backlinks as they possibly can with as little effort as possible. This also fuels the myth that overall link popularity is one of the most important factors for ranking a web page in the search engines.

Visit the average webmaster forum and it’s easy to find several comments and advice advocating the use of self service linking as the preferred method for ranking one’s website. I can only image the quality of the sites being promoted using these methods. I wouldn’t point these types of links at throw away domains, much less anything being developed for the long term.

What do I consider to be a self service link? Any link that results from a direct action of your own accord or one that is attained through automated means. This is one of the favored tactics of inexperienced webmasters or those claiming to be SEO experts or offering so called SEO / link building services. In other words, a link that has no editorial merit.

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Finding the best links is not all that difficult if you’re willing to spend just a little bit of time to evaluate the web site where you’re looking to get a link from. Over the past ten years, this method has provided the results sought after by the clients I’ve served.

Keep in mind that I view social bookmarking as just another passing fad, or the latest electronic ephemera and you’ll understand why I prefer to work for my links much like a curator acquires objects for a museum collection.

Spending just a little bit of time evaluating a web site will lead you to the most important pages within the site. These are the pages you should be seeking links on.

Here’s an example for you from one of my link campaigns.

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Ever feel like something is just out of whack or doesn’t quite add up? I was thinking about all of those three way link exchange emails received, and was wondering if they realize how elementary their theory really is.

It’s suggested that standard reciprocal links are easy to identify because your site A links to their site B, and in return their site B links back to your site A. Since the links are swapped, it’s thought that these links are discounted when it comes to the search engines and their scoring of your backlinks. So reduced or no PageRank, anchor text and SERPs boost.

Then there’s the three-way link exchange.

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I find myself amazed at the  fascination, okay, the obsession with comment spamming for links.  There’s a few free tools and search engines for finding blogs whose comments haven’t been nofollowed to keep all the little kiddies from pissing all over their blog.

There is free software available  that is supposed to help you find blogs that aren’t “nofollowed” so that you can go around town spamming your links with the hopes that they might actually be counted for something by the search engines.

Oh, yeah – I forgot, you’re supposed to get a ton of free targeted traffic this way as well.

While this method may help you obtain those coveted first page results for some absolutely useless long tail keyword phrase that nobody but you are proud of (free animal clubs comes to mind for some reason), I wouldn’t use this method to get these cheap links for any site that you’re serious about.

Why not?

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How successful have your previous link building campaigns been? Find yourself wondering why the response rate to your requests have been so low?

Ever try a typical link building service from a so called SEO expert only to find a multitude of inbound links from splog comments, useless directory listings and dropped domains set up for crappy link exchanges (probably by the guy that sold you the service)?

Think about how you are going about getting your inbound links. It was all too common in the past to search Google for sites related to your own, load it up in your browser, find some contact information and fire off a templated and patronizing message that’s just oozing insincerity while asking begging for a link.

Did you really think they were going to be impressed with your mention of PageRank, popularity and search engine rankings? Come to think of it, why would someone want to link to you if all it does is help your rankings?

There is a better approach.

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