Several years ago I began an online business.
At the time, the field I was entering was not all that crowded, search engine algorithms were much easier to manipulate, and links from relevent sites were not too tough to come by.
In short - if you wanted traffic, and were willing to do a little footwork, you could get it.
Over the past few years, things have changed.
Almost by accident, I stumbled upon a method for increasing, quite dramatically, the number of visitors to my website.
It turns out that almost everybody can design a really cool website...but very few people can write an interesting article. Writing is not a skill which is crucial in todays world, and very few can do it well.
(I, on the other hand, have the opposite problem...its one of the few thing I can do well)
So, what is a webmaster to do if he wants to provide well written content to his visitors Obviously, he needs to get somebody else to write it for him.
That leaves two options:
1. Pay cold hard cash to a professional writer.
2. Find a way to entice good writers to write good content for free.
3. Trade something of value for well written content.
My father once told me that theres no such thing as a free lunch. I believe he was correct, so option 2 is out.
That leaves paying or trading as the only viable options.
Most webmasters have opted for trading.
But what, you may ask, do they have to trade
The trading arrangement which has evolved is one of wriiten content in exchange for a hyperlink.
Hyperlinks are gold in todays Internet economy. The more links a website has back to it, the higher it will rank in the search engines.
Therefore, if I, as a webmaster, can obtain several hundred relevent links to my website, my search engine rank goes way up, and I end up with a ton of visitors.
Do you see the possibilites If youre a decent writer, you can end up having your articles published all over the Internet, with hyperlinks galore pointing back to your website.
But how you ask, do I hook up with website owners who will publish my articles.
Basically, there are several large article repositories online which will allow you to post your articles. Some of these are:
Go ArticlesArticle BeamiSnareArticle FactoryEzine Articles
There are actually quite a few more, if you do a search in Google.
Write a few articles, post them, and see what happens!
John Pierce is the Customer Service Officer for Gold Zero Web Hosting and the webmaster of Article Beam .
If the current indications are correct we may be looking at the end of reciprocal linking as a method of building rank and link popularity, at least as far as Google is concerned.
The latest Google Dance, nicknamed Jagger, has caused major concern by those suffering loss of position on the top ranks of the search engines listings. So we decided to take a close look at what is happening and see what we could learn.
We have a few small websites that have a limited number of links. These sites are used mostly for research and testing of our primary business in Web Analytics. By analyzing these sites, we were able to quickly get an idea of what is happening in Googles Jagger Update, which is still in progress at the time of this writing.
By using our web analytics tools, we were able to look at the history of visits by the bots and the links to these small sites. We had to go back as far as January in order to build a picture of Googles actions. Our software also allows us to look at all links from the SEs, not just those shown by using the browsers link: command. G only reports some of the links to your site, not all.
Here is what we have seen:
Like many other sites, we noticed a sharp drop in rank in our test sites around the first of July. They lost about 40% of their previous link popularity and moved down sharply in rank. Also, duplicate links on a single site disappeared. We now only showed one link from each linking site.
As Jagger started, unlike many others we have seen complain about Gs actions and timing, our sites stayed rather stable. Evidently they had already suffered their major losses. However, there was a small increase in the number of links. This caught our attention. We had expected that, like many others, we would experience further disruptions to our link structure.
But when we examined these links, we were surprised to see that not one of them had been listed with Google a few weeks earlier. Not one. Our research showed that these links had been live in Gs archive, but none had shown up publicly before now. It appeared that there was some sort of aging process taking place, but this may just be coincidental. It is more likely that older links disappeared because the host site was lost in the shuffle and our links no longer appeared relevant.
The other thing we noticed was that not one of these new links was listed on our reciprocal links pages. In other words, all reciprocal links had vanished. We think that this is because G is down-grading or eliminating reciprocal links as a measure of popularity. This does make sense, actually. Reciprocal links are a method of falsifying popularity. Sort of a cheap method of buying a link, if you want to think of it that way.
If your web sites have suffered from the latest dance, you may want to take a look at the type and source of your links. If they are mostly from link exchanges, you are probably looking at the reason for your move down the list on the search engines.
During the second week of the Jagger Update, a few of our reciprocal links did come back up. However, we also noticed that these were from places where we had highly relevant content. They came from articles where we discussed our area of expertise: Web Analytics, or from forums where we had relevant threads. So we feel that these links came back because of content, not linking.
The other group that came back up was one-way inbound text links, regardless of the originating web site. These links also had strong relevance to our web analytics business. In other words, they contained keywords and/or phrases related to our site and its business.
This research has us now re-evaluating our linking strategy. We urge others to do the same.
We are now concentrating only on building strong one-way inbound links. We are focusing on publicity, articles, directories, and other direct methods of building our image and consumer awareness.
In addition, we are also looking for associated but non competing firms like web developers, Search Engine Marketers, SEOs, web site owners and designers to partner with us to build direct business relationships and the resulting inbound links. This strategy may not be the fastest method of building links, but we feel it is rock solid and within the spirit of good business practices. The best thing is that it is search engine independent.
We will no longer worry about chasing (or beating) the search engines and their ever changing algorithms. That is a fools game we are sure to lose.
Instead, we will focus on building rock solid links and popularity with the group that counts: our customers. By focusing on beating our competition and providing a top quality product, plenty of educational information and relevant content, we are sure to move up and stay at the top of the search engine rankings.
Its something to think about.
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Copyright 2005 by WG Moore
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About the author
Will Moore is a web analytics specialist with over 20 years of hardware, software and web development experience. He has sat on the ANSII and ISO standards committees, been a speaker at major technical conferences in the US, Europe, China and Singapore and has written numerous articles on various technical subjects. Visit Web Stats Gold at for more articles and information on web analytics. You may contact him at