What is the Golden link? Whether it is a contextual link, hosted (pre-sell) page, an article or .edu link or even a link on a page with the url, /add-link-free-reciprocal-directory-submit-site.html the best type of page to get a link from is a page with a large amount of inbound links to it. You want links from pages that have links. Sometimes you need to take matters into your own hands. (more…)

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As I was reading SEOBook’s recent post about Yahoo Search Marketing being more broke then ever it really got me thinking about their recent decision making. Yahoo closed shop on one of the most widely used keyword tools for internet marketers and SEO’s alike, the “keyword suggestion tool”. (more…)

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The topic of Googlebombing or Googlewashing is a topic that I have been using as an example forever (it seems) to illustrate anchor text, backlinks and many other reasons (gray,white or blackhat seo - or whatever), but it seems now, its no more. (more…)

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Today I was reading John Scott’s latest post about why Matt Cutts should chill and it just makes me want to share my two cents. I am getting tired of all the annoying conversations going on about buying links being bad, unethical, black hat’ish”, or otherwise gray. (more…)

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Jim Boykin had a great post I saw today on expert link building. I wanted to chime in and profess my love for link building. Honestly Link building is my first love in seo and like Jim I get sometimes lonley when I am spending most of my time running 97th Floor and not finding links. (more…)

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In light of all the attention the V7 post has gotten today John Scott was cool enough to let me ask him some questions regarding the new service. Overall I am excited about it. Here is what we talked about.

>How long have you been testing the service privately? (more…)

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Via Marketing Pilgrim I saw that V7 is now selling paid contextual ads. What they are boasting as being different from others in the paid links arena is that their sites are 100% hidden from the grasp of Matt, but more importantly in my book is that they are all contextual in content links. (more…)

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There has been talk lately of just how important that number one spot is compared to the remaining 9. MSN just did some eye tracking and it solidified the old golden trianlge eye tracking results. I am always testing, we own and run many sites outside of our clients for income and testing and I am a link whore. I love links I will take links from anyone I can get them. However I have been testing somethings latley that I used to test a lot more. I have been cutting the link fat and testing the results to my sites by removing links. Most SEO’s would never utter the words “remove my links” but I have been testing some things and have found that there are links that definately will help your rankings by removing them.

Im not talking about removing junky reciprocals I am talking about removing one ways, maybe it is a site that has added adult or gambling links to questionable sites since adding yours. Maybe it is a sitewide on a 50,000 indexed page site that you should of never bought from digital point. Or more advanced seo’s may tell you it has something to do with your link neighborhood. Either way your next strategy to shoot yourself to the number one spot maybe to remove links instead of get them.

Disclaimer* Don’t go thinking you bought some link from TLA or TLB or someone else and the next day when you got the order confirmation and it just so happend that your rankings were jacked that google is penalizing you for a paid link. Links can take a while to give full effect. Im not talking about stressing out about a link from Topix or Info Please from a text broker Im talking about huge site wides, bad link neighborhoods, and sites linking to you and some adult video king.

Either way are you watching your links like a hawk? Are you paying attention to the other sites being linked to on that page you were so stoked about 4 months ago? Even if your rankings aren’t hurt by having qustionable sites next to you in your link profile wouldn’t you hate for a competitor or researcher see those links next to yours on a certain page? Or maybe you get the link on a page linking out to a million gambling sites and wait til your competitor gets it too then you remove yours

Links are still the reason for the Trust (rank) and you should be monitoring them like a mad man.

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Most people I talk to did not even know that the directory was down which I think is funny, or sad that I knew it all so well!

As much as it pains me to post this info (because you all know my thoughts on DMOZ), I just wanted to make sure everyone knew that it was open for submissions again. Yes, as much as it pains me, I have already started submitting sites again…(and praying….hard). Enjoy!

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I got this link building question that I thought was worthy of a post today:

In the spirits of both good link karma and getting more keyword rich content, should we publish other’s articles on our blog? Or would it be better to just give a link? Or neither?

I like the thinking of this individual when it comes to building a solid linking campaign, so here goes!

My personal feelings, and strategies that I implement myself always lead me to in the direction of not being stingy when it comes to outbound linking. I will always give away a relevant link without hesitation if its worthy. I think if you are being stingy with your outbound links it can hurt your link building strategies in more ways the one.

If you are not going to be giving out any links, you may lose opportunity of some people wanting to link back to you simply because you linked to them in a story, on a blog roll or just in a link somewhere on your site where it makes sense. I have found that if I include a link in a blog post to another site, a lot of times I will get a link back on a story done about my site (or post) inside that site. Also, when linking to other sites (or blog posts) a lot of the blogs have what are called “trackbacks” that will include a little “snippit” of what you said including a link to your site. The bad side to this if you have trackbacks enabled you will probably get a good deal of spam, and need to stay on top of it, unless you have some pretty good spam filtering software.

I also believe that linking out to other sites helps improve your search engine rankings. I know a lot of internet business owners will shy away from linking out in fear of visitors leaving their site, but if you have a site that is worth coming back to, they will do just that. I do not claim to know exactly how Google works, or how they crawl the web and pass authority, but I do know that linking out has never hurt any of my sales, back links, conversion rates or SERP’s (Search Engine Ranking Positions).

So the quick answer to this question would be any kind of linking out, if its to related sites or articles is never a bad idea. If you are linking to them through an article they wrote, the content part of it really won’t help you (when it comes to building quality content) because they created the content, but linking to it and having the article on your site will not hurt you. If you had nothing but duplicate stories, and never original content (or blog posts) that could hurt you for sure, but I don’t think that is what was intended with this question that I got asked.

The bottom line is to work hard to build up credible links back to your site, (from authority sites, and related sites) and if you can do this by “scratching someones back” (linking to them in a post or article) for the chances of linking to you, I never see that being a bad thing!

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