EBONews - Online Advertising and Marketing

Tips and information on advertising online, website promotion, business and marketing.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Reciprocal Linking Mistakes, Marketing Resources.

EBONews - Friday, March 23, 2007


In This Issue:

- Reciprocal Linking: Don't make this mistake.

- Online Marketing Resources



Hello Everyone,

If you have been wondering if Reciprocal linking is still a
good idea, then read below. I'll give you Google's opinion
on it, as well as mistakes to avoid when linking with other
sites and how to correctly do a link exchange.

Google, says yes, links to your site are important! They
say to help you get a bigger search engine ranking, make
sure other sites link to yours.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40349&ctx=related

By having other sites linking to yours, it helps Google's
crawlers find your site and as well gives your site a greater
visibility in their search results.

Google uses their PageRank with sophisticated text-matching
techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant
to each search.

Google interprets links to your site as a "vote" for your site
from the other sites. Google looks at more than the sheer
volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes
the page that casts the vote. "Votes" from sites that Google
considers "important" will weigh more heavily in determining
your search engine ranking.

Therefore, do NOT go out and try to get as many links as
possible. Google calls these "unnatural links" that are placed
there specifically to make your site look more popular to
the search engines. These types of links are link farms, or
linking schemes and doorway pages.

Google says in their Webmaster Guidelines:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your
site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web
spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own
ranking may be affected adversely by those links."

Link Farms:
I am seeing more and more webmasters asking for "three
way links". For example, if you place their link on your site,
they will place your link on a different site other than their
main site. They try to justify it as a better solution than
reciprocating links from your site to theirs by saying
it's a one way link to your site from the "link farm".

Therefore, the "three way linker" do not have any links
on their main site. They are getting higher quality sites to
line to them, making it appear that their site is more popular.

You get the short end of the stick! Your site's link is now on
a site that is nothing more than a "link farm".

Link farms are sites that have nothing but a huge directory of
links. The search engines do NOT see these as "important".
So therefore, you have just hurt your site by agreeing to a
three way link exchange.

There are many reciprocal link management services and
link farm products. You will recognize them by the
template-based emails offering to exchange links. All of
them will want to place your link in nothing but a directory
of links (a link farm), where it does not do your site
any good at all and will actually harm your search engine
ranking.

Awhile back when I realized what was going on, I began
declining all "three way link" exchange offers. However, I
did keep those in my links directory, which had been
submitted before that. Now I see that was also a mistake.
My PageRank dropped a point. The PageRanks of my
links directory pages that had once been between 1 to
3, dropped to 0.

Therefore I am going to do a clean up of my Links Directory
and delete all sites that were "three way links". You may want
to do the same if you want to improve your search engine
ranking.

How To Properly Do Reciprocal Link Exchanges:

DO go to websites that are relevant to your site's theme.
Check to see if they have a "Links" page or it may be
listed as "Link Exchange Program". These are usually
listed on websites in the lower left hand or right hand
columns or at the bottom of the site. You can see where
I placed mine on the left hand column at
http://everydaybusinessonline.com

Follow their instructions for submitting your link, after all
you are the one asking them, not the other way around. If
they ask you to send an email, do it. If they ask you to fill out
a form to submit your request for a link exchange, do so.

Do NOT send them an email without even visiting their
site. I get so many emails that say, "I just visited your
wonderful site.... blah, blah, blah, it would be to both
our advantage to exchange links..."

I know they did not visit my site, if they did they would
have seen the link to my Link Exchange Program which
clearly states that I do not do exchanges by email, they
must click on link and fill out the request form.

I hope this helps you in understanding the significance
of links exchanges and how to avoid the pitfalls when
building your link exchange program.


Online Marketing Resources:
Here are some resources to help you build your
business.

Denise Hall is giving away to reports.
"Golden List Secrets" - This is about building a list.
and "The Missing Link" - Discover the One Ingredient you
must have to pull everything together and take your
business to the next level. Click Here.

The Resource Report. - A Free Report by Mike Filsaime.
In this report he lists every resource he uses to build and
run his multi-million dollar business. Click Here.

Paul Galloway released his "Internet Marketer's Little
Black Book". It is 65 pages of the best tools and resources
to grow your internet business. There are no affiliate links in
the e-book, so he has nothing to gain by giving you this
information other than having you sign up to his list before
you can receive it. However, I found it to be a great resource
that you will be referring to when looking for something specific.
Click Here.


To your success,

Sue Norrad
Everyday Business Online
http://everydaybusinessonline.com
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