I was just reviewing a post that Doug posted at digitalpoint and thought it might…
Category: Search Engine Optimisation
I’m taking an unusual step here and using someone elses article – but that’s because CReed has addressed the very issue I’ve been asked about lately – Paid Links.
I’ve sold a few links on various sites, but I haven’t solicited them and I doubt there’s been more than 5. It’s not the business I’m in. But people do sell links on blogs, directories and regular websites. It’s a discreet form of advertising and can be a good way to get a high profile inbound link to your site. Some offer only SEO benefits, others offer human traffic.
So, if you’ve exhausted all the free directories and don’t want to get into link exchanges then maybe paid links will be the next step. If so, then read on.
Mike Dammann has launched his own Directory Contest. It’s a twist on the regular SEO contests and it’ll be interesting to see how it pans out.
I’ve got two entries
- RealState for Real Estate has a Directory Contest page
- Property Investment Directory has a Directory Contest page
In both cases the links aren’t visible on the directory homepage and the links are 2 or 3 clicks into the site.
A couple of days before the launch of WDANZ I thought I’d use the opportunity to analyse how effective Google Alerts are. I wanted to test the breadth of indexing and how quickly the reactions of bloggers might be picked up.
In the table below you can see how Google indexed the sites talking about this breaking news item.
Curiously, the reports seem to be out of date – the ComputerWorld example is the best – by the time the alert comes through the story had been buried in the archives.
This doesn’t spell doom for Google’s alerts – where they can direct you to a permalink – but it does render the homepage alerts virtually worthless.
Perhaps those three were never meant to go together!
Social Networking sites, and Digg.com in particular, aim to give users the chance to read the latest news, to vote on it and to share anything they’ve found.
They rely on group participation to provide content and to provide a reason to keep returning.
There’s a story entitled How much a digg worth? (someone is buying digg!!) where the following comment is made:
it is quite disgusting how people using digg for their own gain
And that in itself is comical. Isn’t Digg about gaining knowledge, gaining experience, gaining entertainment, gaining traffic and gaining exposure? Gain is the underlying motivation of every user who visits Digg.
Perhaps it’s just the taint of money that turned that user off?
Personally I’m unashamed that I use Digg for personal gain – it’s a great tool to keep abreast of the latest tech news – as judged by my peers – and to promote this blog. So for the rest of this entry I’ll make myself a case study.
I’m not a big user of Digg.com but you’ll find my profile at http://www.digg.com/users/sarahk/.
Now, if I could just get this on an API it would be great.
I ran the MSN Ad Demographics tool past some of my favourite sites and learnt
A while back I mentioned how a short lived forum demo lasted months in the SERPs. Another effect I’ve found with new sites is that the sites you use for dropping links will kick butt in the SERPs for a couple of weeks until the search engines fully index and propogate the results around the data centers.
A couple of weeks is no biggie and eventually you’ll pop out on top. The thing is, you drop the links from sites you know are indexed well because they’re going to help you and quickly.
So, I was amused to see, on a forum I frequent, that one site owner was requesting link exchanges and a site review for his Nintendo Wii site.
NoFollow was hailed as the saviour of our sites, the answer to comment spam, forum spam and poorly maintained sites.
The idea was that by adding the “rel” attribute to a link the search engines would know that the link isn’t endorsed by the site.
[html]MySite[/html]
The syntax isn’t difficult and easy enough for a spammer to find, and walk away from.
Sadly, the spammers haven’t caught on, and continue to employ unfortunates to do their dirty work, hoping that one day someone will see the light and spend some money on their ridiculous sites.
A spam filled site is a neglected site, one where the owner has had good intentions but not the time or inclination to follow through. The spam becomes a red flag to Joe Average that the site isn’t maintained and to look further for the information sought. That the site will eventually be downgraded in the search engines is appropriate – it is after all, stale and abandoned.