A lot has changed when it comes to gaining links to your website. More importantly a lot has changed on what is considered a good link or a bad link. With the economy in the tank, we are getting more and more calls for help with search position and increased traffic. Some of the calls are from potential clients that have never paid for any type of link building or site optimization, but a good percentage is from small business owners that have either been a part of Link Exchange programs or have purchased links in the past and now they are finding out  it is not working for their website any more. If you are not familiar with the Google or Bing guidelines for links then you should read Google’s position on link exchanges and Links: the good, the bad, and the ugly – Part 2 from Bing.

Paid Blog Networks

So what do you do if link exchange software doesn’t work any more? How about all the fuss about these blog networks? That’s a question we have received a few times. First let me tell you about blog link networks where you pay a monthly fee and publish as many posts as you want, with links to your website. Your posts are distributed throughout a “network” of blogs. The claim is link diversity and unlimited potential. Don’t waste your time! This type of network is popular because they pay out good commissions, that’s it! These networks are easily detected which means they are easily discounted by Bing and Google and could be considered a bad neighborhood. You will waste a lot of time writing or you will pay additional fees to have the writing done for you, and you get nothing or near nothing in return. That time and money would have been better spent putting an article on a popular article network or sending out a press release. While neither of those methods are high value they generally have some value, unlike the so called Nirvana of subscription blog networks. With generic category based blog networks with no specific theme and some of the worst content ever written, you will get zero benefit. Once your post is pushed off of the main page or the main category page, which usually happens in a day or two, any value is lost. At that point your time, effort and money live on a page buried in a site that nobody, including Bing and Google, gives a rat’s ass about.

Example of a Blog Network where you pay per month to post as many times as you want. Just look at the quality.

Example 1 – Example 2

If you think this type of site is not easily detectable, let me show you how I found them: Google This and then look for nonsensical domain names as the title. See the similarity? Most of these are from one of the most popular subscription blog networks out there. Notice every post has a single keyword link buried in the post? It gets worse, look at almost any post that is over 90 days old and copy a unique sentence, then search for the quoted sentence on Google, and 90% of the time the article can’t be found. The only people making money here is the owner of the blog system and their affiliates.

Let me say that there might be a paid blog network that actually works, but it would need to follow a few rules. I just pointed out one of the most popular networks that in my opinion is a waste of money and just ripping people off. If someone really wants to create a blog network that works, it would need to follow at least the following 4 rules:

1. At least 75% of the posts need to be commercial quality information without any paid links embedded in the article.
2. Every subscriber’s post needs to be reviewed by an editor for “real value”.
3. Each blog needs to have a theme and specialize in one particular subject.
4. Each blog in the network needs to be optimized and promoted as a “real website” with good content.

That said, you are most likely still violating Google’s guidelines if you pay to post your link on those sites. I’m not judging, just pointing out the risk involved.

How To Build Links

So how do you get quality links to your site? You need to create information and multimedia that people need and are willing to link to. Then you need to contact relevant websites and convince them that they should link to your content. If you are a product reseller, you should get your vendors to link to you as an authorized dealer. If you are a member or sponsor of any organizations, you need to get them to link to you as a such. You could do some guest blogging, but be sure the value of the link you get is greater than the value you would get from posting the article on your own website. You can also use article marketing, press releases, and directory submission but it’s just for diversity and extra exposure, alone they are not the answer.

Let me know if you agree, disagree or what I missed. I look forward to your comments. | Read the original Link Building 2010

• You suck at life so you need to hold them hostage
• You have no idea what you are doing
• You suck at life and plan on charging clients crazy $$ to leave your sorry company

Let’s be serious, if your company offers reliable hosting or professional web design and you make requested changes or answer support questions in a timely manner then most of your customers will never leave you. A small percentage will move around because a salesman convinces them they need “their” service or maybe you don’t offer a specialized application the client needs, but for the most part if you just stop sucking as a webmaster you can maintain your hosting and web design clients.

The only reason a webmaster or web host needs to hold a domain name hostage is because he knows he has nothing to offer of value. It’s really not difficult to please small business owners. Make sure their email and website are online and update their website when they ask you too. Answer emails and the phone in a timely manner. Is that really too complicated?

Understand your limitations and when you know you can’t meet your customer’s expectations then admit it, help them move somewhere that can. Think I’m crazy? Trust me, the next time they need something they might just call you again, you know why? Because you were helpful. For some reason that’s uncommon in the small business web world. Some of you act like losing $15 or $20 per month in hosting fees is going to bankrupt you.

Some of you are so offended by losing a client that you turn into an evil crook and you take hostages (domain names). I can’t keep track of the number of times I have been put in the position of hostage negotiator so some poor old lady can have *her* domain name transferred to *her*.

Time to face the facts. If your only chance of customer retention is stealing domain names (taking hostages) then you are going to fail.

Let’s call the cookie lady Betty. Betty has no ambition, at least not anymore. Her husband makes a hefty income, she finally quit her crappy job and she likes to bake cookies. Betty is done, take her out of the oven, that’s everything she wanted.

Friends and Family – Betty’s brother-in-law, Eddie, comes along and woofs down a dozen of her sugar cookies. High on the sugar, he tells her she could sell these cookies on the Internet and make a fortune. Betty asks Eddie if he really thinks she can sell them on the net. Eddie says his “Worm Farming in a Box” pyramid site is really taking off (Lie) so he is sure she can do it too. Now the rest of the friends and family join in cheering Betty on, telling her how much money she could make on the Internet (It’s Magic). So now Betty is pumped, all she has to do is almost nothing and she can get rich on the Internet. “Almost nothing” is a little more ambition than she has, but maybe she can muster up the strength.

Web Designer – Betty finds out her cousin Cindy’s kid just graduated high school and he has the most popular website on the planet, and he built it from scratch. Right away they hit it off because Betty builds cookies from scratch (box). Plus this kid knows more about the internet than Al Gore. So for $200 bucks, Betty is hooked up with a website to sell cookies. Her cousin’s kid used all the latest technology, including those cascading tables, so it is going to be a surefire success.

Social Media Expert – Someone tells Betty that the Pastor’s sister is a big deal on Twitter and Facebook. She gets the story about how she can have tens of thousands of followers in a month and followers are better than pixie dust. So she pays the Twit $60 for a 2 hour lesson on “how to use Twitter” and away she goes. Next week, for $75 she can find out how to share her high school and wedding photos with thousands of strangers on Facebook.

Pay-Per-Click – It’s been 4 months and no sales. Betty is discouraged, but brother-in-law Eddie is back to the rescue. His worm sales had “slowed” last month after he got banned from Twitter, so he set up a Google AdWords account and he has never looked back. Betty whips out the credit card, and she and Eddie set up an AdWords account. Eddie hooks her up with all the best keywords: “cookies”, “sugar cookies”, “baked goods”, “recipes”, “housewife”… They start the budget at $200 per day as Eddie quotes from memory the PPC website he read, “You get every PPC dime you spend back in sales.”

Reality Check – The $6000 credit card bill comes in. Lucky for Betty, the ads have stopped on their own because of the expiration date on the card. Betty’s husband gets involved because he now has an investment in a sugar cookie website. He calls and talks to some Internet Marketing companies. Company #1 tells him they are sure they can turn this disaster around for $3000 per month with their awesome directory submission and secret link building service. Company #2 tells him he has nothing they can work with. He will need a business plan and a niche because he isn’t going to sell Betty’s sugar cookies unless he can make them unique. He argues that the congregation loves them. Company #2 continues “unless you have time lapse photos of the cookies transforming into images of Mary or Jesus then we can’t help you. Even if they are miracle cookies you would be better off on eBay than hiring us.” He swears at them, slams down the phone and hires company #1.

The End – Three months later Betty calls Internet Company #2 and says they are all out of money, in serious debt, and they really need help. She then asks if she can pay for their services after they turn her cookie business around…

Should we report our competition or sites we come across for Web SPAM, or is it Taboo? Does it make you a snitch or a rat? Is it OK to publicly point it out but not in a private report?

I think everyone would have a somewhat different opinion of what the Utopian Web would be like. Ask 100 people the question, “What is Web SPAM?” and see how many answers you get. Some will tell you it’s the ocean of scraper sites that steal data for content so they can run ads. Others say it’s the numerous sites that come up top 10 for unrelated content or that come up top ten but have little or no content, just a big funnel towards AdSense. Just like we won’t all agree on that question we also don’t agree on how to police the web and whose job it is to fight webspam. This is another example of  how SEO and search mirrors politics.

What are SPAM reports?

Matt Cutts recently asked for SPAM reports but what are they? Are they reports that show people buying links? Is Web SPAM really sites that buy or sell links? Maybe indirectly, because people buying links can, in many cases, have their sites rank higher than those that don’t. I’m sure by now you have heard some stories about what kind of links you can buy for the price of a MacBook Air

SPAM is not just those buying links and in many cases a purchased link should not be considered a bad thing, in my opinion. I’m sure there are a lot of people who paid to be in Best of the Web that don’t actually use the site or expect others to, they just wanted the link.

Should content scraping and 100% pure funnel to AdSense type SPAM sites be included and addressed in SPAM reports too? Is Google’s AdSense partly responsible for creating the Web SPAM they claim they want to get rid of?

Can the community police itself?

If Microsoft’s Bing Team and Google’s Web SPAM team listen then I think so. When the MacBook issue hit TechCrunch the pages that may have benefited were pulled down (as far as I know), and I think this can be credited to the web community and peer pressure, partly. Score one for the community. Now there is a ton of talk about Mahalo and SPAM. Some claim that something is being done, others say no. I like to think that Google has acted as Big Daddy and contacted Mahalo and we are in a holding pattern, just waiting to see the response. This is speculation on my part and many will argue that this isn’t fair because their little $500 per month MFA site would just get burned down without warning if they violated the terms of service. Let’s not be naive, you aren’t Mahalo, you don’t count and the big boys always play by different rules. That said, we do expect after numerous warnings have not been addressed that action will be taken. If not, the community will not be capable of policing itself. Bing and Google must listen and take action for that to work. If they don’t, the top 10 search positions for all but the smallest niche markets will eventually be filled with corporate built, Made-For-Adsense or advertising websites. Don’t get me wrong, not all MFA sites are SPAM. There are some bright people building useful sites and their original intention was to make money from AdSense or other ads; they chose to do it by providing “real” content.

Let me know, should we snitch publicly, privately, or not at all? Tell me what you consider to be the worst type of Web SPAM or at least what your definition is.

If I own 10 websites and link them all together do I own a link farm? Will my competition report me? What if all 10 have unique content? Let’s extrapolate that over 200 websites. What if they all have unique, valuable, content but also have links between each other? See where the problem comes in? Many individuals and companies own 10, 20, or maybe hundreds of websites. If someone reports you for owning 20 websites that all link to each other at what point or through what checks are they considered a farm? What if they are all on the same IP address or registered to the same individual or company? We can only hope that content value and link purpose is a big consideration when judging a group of web sites as a farm. It would be great if we knew the answers but Google, for fear of aiding “the bad guys” rarely goes into detail. The best I can find from Google is this Link Schemes article at Google Webmaster Central. I saw a comment once where it was suggested one ask himself “Would I be doing this if the search engines didn’t exist?”. Well, yeah! How else would anyone find my other 50 websites if there was no search engine.

What about link swaps?

Are SEOs moving away from link swaps? One thing I can see in some search results reports is that Google has made some headway with link swaps. In some niche markets I monitor, I see some top sites losing position, sites that counted heavily on link management software for the past few years to build thousands of inbound links. I hope the decline in position for sites that use blatant, irrelevant link swapping continues but it must be done with consideration for context, content, and value of the swap. To penalize a two way link swap just because it is two-way goes against some of the finer points of valuing links. If I link to my local Chamber of Commerce and then join that Chamber at a later date will I be penalized because they now link back? If so then that becomes a real issue. I know search algorithms have evolved but maybe sometimes we need to remind the brainiacs of the simple and obvious.

New attempts to cheat the system.

A new practice I see with some big SEO agencies is 3-way link swaps between those in their portfolio. I’m not talking about a few clients who know each other and trade links. As far as I can tell these are large numbers of 3-way link swaps being managed with an application. It’s a genius idea for these big companies with 100 or more SEO clients where they can manage links without any two-way trades. I was able to detect this because of their public portfolio pages but imagine the really bright ones that don’t offer a portfolio page. If they keep the swaps between relevant markets then this might just be the one that works. Once they build a reputation of “page one results” then it becomes perpetual and they could really dominate the SEO field with this tactic. One caveat for their clients is that once they stop paying that marketing company they potentially lose two dozen or more quality links. It’s a little scary for the little guys (me).

Remember, Bing Search is not too far behind, if it doesn’t work with Google then it won’t be long before it doesn’t work with Bing.

What do you think, do link exchanges still make sense? Have you noticed some high-tech link farms? Should we report SPAM to Google?

For advanced users I will warn you that, at the time of my last install you could not change the default install path for MySql or PHP. This is easy to get around, just download and install PHP and MySql before you use the Platform Installer for the first time to set up WordPress. The Platform Installer will recognize your installations. Happy Blogging.

Almost forgot, here is how you create 301 redirects on Windows Server 2008 (and server 2003 with IIS6) if you are migrating from an existing site to a CMS platform.

IIS6:

Redirect a single file.

1. Open IIS Manager and locate the website
2. Right click the file you want to redirect and choose properties
3. Change the selector to “A Redirection to a URL”
4. In the “Redirect To:” box type the new URL
5. Put a check in “A permanent redirection for this resource” (this results in an HTTP status code of: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently)

That’s it!

Redirect an entire domain name – website.

1. Open IIS Manager and locate the website
2. Right click the Website you want to redirect and choose properties
3. Select the “Home Directory Tab”
4. Change the selector to “A Redirection to a URL”
5. In the “Redirect To:” box type the new URL
6. Put a check in “A permanent redirection for this resource” (this results in an HTTP status code of: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently)

OPTIONAL: Check “The exact URL entered above” if you want all pages redirected to the home page of the new domain rather than relative pages in the new domain.

IIS 7:

Redirect a single file.

1. Open IIS Manager and locate the website under sites
2. Right click the website and choose “switch to content view”
3. In the right hand pane locate the file you want to redirect
4. Right click the file and choose “switch to features view”
5. Important! Verify that it shows the correct file name at the top of the screen
6. Under the IIS section open “HTTP Redirect”
7. Put a check in “Redirect requests to this destination” and type in the new URL
8. Change the status code to “Permanent 301″
9. Click Apply (this results in an HTTP status code of: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently)

That’s it!

Redirect an entire domain name – web site.

1. Open IIS Manager and locate the website under sites
2. Important! Verify that it shows the correct website name at the top of the screen
3. Under the IIS section open “HTTP Redirect”
4. Put a check in “Redirect requests to this destination” and type in the new URL
5. Change the status code to “Permanent 301″
6. Click Apply (this results in an HTTP status code of: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently)

OPTIONAL: Check the “redirect all requests to exact destination (instead of relative to destination)”

New in IIS 7:

For those that understand XML and the web.config file you can add a line similar to the following in the <configuration> section rather than using IIS Manager:

Domain redirect:

<system.webServer>
<httpRedirect enabled=”true” destination=”http://www.my-new-site.com” httpResponseStatus=”Permanent” />
</system.webServer>

File Redirect:

<location path=”my-old-file.htm”>
<system.webServer>
<httpRedirect enabled=”true” destination=”http://www.new-domain.com/my-new-file.htm” exactDestination=”true” httpResponseStatus=”Permanent” />
</system.webServer>
</location>

—

* copy and pasting the web.config examples could result in the wrong quotes which will cause an error. Re-type your quotes.

Recently Google has been taking heat from some of the media moguls like Mark Cuban and Rupert Murdoch. If you are out of the loop on this one then read “Rupert Murdock to Block Google“. The question is how will it affect search? Will they get shut out from some content? Is it just a ploy, a business tactic to get Google and Microsoft to pay up? For the small players and the general public it’s hard to comprehend the size and scope. I see a lot of chatter and opinions but it reminds me of a day trader trying to give Warren Buffett advice. It’s the same when average bloggers try to debate the likes of Cuban and Murdoch on big business. Some of it is obvious Google fanboy speak or on the other end the haters, but in the middle are some really smart bloggers in the search community that are giving opinions based on zero experience in the big game. You may have helped a million dollar company but we are talking, in Rupert’s words “serious money“. We will see what happens but for now I’m not completely counting out a paywall business model although I don’t see it being good for either side. I would push my chips toward Google and Bing paying up for the feeds just like they did with Facebook and Twitter. That looks like a profitable model that the big boys could work out. But it’s all a crap shoot to me, I have zero experience with “serious money“.

Raw Data and Privacy – What’s the Value?

On a smaller scale we also have some chatter about raw data and the cost. Some of the industry leading SEO and SEM talent are  talking about the value of the data that is being given away for free. When someone types in a search term it is mind boggling what gets crunched and how fast the results are produced. Plenty of these result algorithms have been built with personal data and business data from a number of sources. Google builds free services and “trades” them for your data, in a sense. People are starting to ask which party is getting the better deal. Free mail, free analytics, free apps, not really. You are trading privacy and numbers that are worth more than the time and effort it takes Google to build the “free” products.

There is also the concern that giving up your data on a PPC account can cost you more money. Think about it, without Google Analytics then G only knows when someone clicks your ad and where it lands. With GA script on your site they can see the entire transaction process after the click. Like they say, nothing is free.

AdSense and PubCenter

A new battle is brewing between rivals Google and Microsoft. Microsoft is now in Beta for their competing product that could rival AdSense. With the hope of better customer service and higher payouts this could bring some much needed competition. Currently publishers are playing with fire if they depend on AdSense for most of their revenue. If you wake up one day and you are deactivated by Google then you are out of business. Currently Google prefers to be vague and for the most part, ignore those that have their accounts deactivated. It would be great if the competition opens up new channels of support and a little help when you truly don’t know why they deactivated you. Looking at Microsoft’s AdCenter site you can easily find customer service and support numbers and they encourage the use. There have been complaints about recent AdSense payout cuts too so this might be a plus for Microsoft. If Microsoft can get enough advertisers to choose their ad network then this is really big news and could result in “serious money”.

Support Experience

Microsoft AdCenter (Good): A warm body answered within 30 seconds and was able to answer a question about linking accounts without transferring the call.

Google AdWords (Slow): We have waited 4 days for a level 2 to determine why there is a landing page glitch for a client where they can’t get an ad to show at any price. Google’s own tools say the keywords are targeted and relevant. The first thing we did was to verify they are within guidelines. They run a legit vacation rental web site with their own rental property. They are not resellers and have zero ads on their site. As I’m writing this I find out that the issue has been resolved. How did I find out? I checked the campaign and sometime after my second request for an update the ads started showing but guess what? Not a single reply or response from Google. Forget finding out what was wrong, they didn’t even acknowledge it was fixed. This small business had no ads for 5 days.
Note: I changed the rating to slow from poor. We did finally receive a response and Google admitted the landing page was evaluated incorrectly by the system. Everything is working now.

Google AdSense (Poor): No answer to requests about disabled accounts. Repeated attempts to get a reinstatement go unanswered. Google implies that everyone is disabled for click fraud when they might be disabled for poor content or maybe something as simple as having the words “pick a link” as link text. Please fix this system before it becomes “serious money“.

Update: Another Blow? Microsoft extends their search deal with FaceBook, adds Bing features and will power search for FB outside the USA too. Read more about it at Search Engine Land