Posts Tagged ‘Methods of website linking’

Proper Link Exchange Strategy


2012
09.10

In the beginning, there was light, and Yahoo shined above all the others. To get web traffic and to the top of Yahoo’s search results it was important to be admitted into its directory. A link from their directory is still very powerful, but mostly they charge for that service now.

Along came google with a new formula, whereby a website was judged by the number of links pointing to it. Each link pointing to a website is like a positive vote. Why else would someone link to another page from theirs if the page they were linking to did not serve some useful purpose?

This concept has been labeled PageRank, whereby the higher a page’s ranking evaluation (0 is the lowest and 10 is the highest), the higher it will show up in google’s search results. This is because the webpage’s pagerank is taken into consideration in google’s algorithm (a long, mathematical formula used to compute the ranking of pages according to the keywords searched) when it is deciding which order to rank pages in.

This formula proved very effective and soon people realized that they were getting better search results with google than they were with Yahoo, so they started switching on mass.

Of course, webmasters caught on quickly too and it became an industry to build “backlinks” – which are links from other websites to yours (if you are the webmaster). All sorts of services sprouted which were designed to accumulate these backlinks for a webmaster. Perhaps it was a submission to 500 directories for a fee of $50. Many such directories sprouted up and included automated systems which made submission to them easier. A domain, such as ezinearticles.com, can be purchased for as little as $12 a year. This means someone can set up an automated directory, then use the programming scripts to do the same but on many other domains. The services which automatically submit links for their clients do so on many of these automated directories, while the directories themselves try to earn an income by including google ads on each of their pages. A single page might mention only a link to your site, with the title and description text, while you have the option to pay extra to push your link to a more prominent, visible and higher traffic location in their directory.

All these sorts of gimmicks and tricks were designed to take advantage of the google pagerank system in order to elevate a page’s ranking in google’s search results. Afterall, how often do you look past the first page of 10 results when surfing the internet? If you are not on the first page, or even in the top few links, much fewer people will actually stumble on your site.

But along comes Panda and Penguin. No, these are not two animals wishing to build links to their little cove in nature, but an adjustment in google’s algorithm to battle against these tactics. After all, google became much more successful than yahoo precisely because its formula for search results was more accurate and successful. But if everyone jumps on the bandwagon and starts to frantically build backlinks, it distorts the original concept in favor of those who practice this strategy. Links are no longer an honest vote and reflection of a website’s usefulness, but can be considered as spam intended to distort google’s search results in someone’s favor.

These tactics would negatively affect google’s business strategy, which is based on producing quality and accurate results, so in the spring of 2012 it rolled up its sleeves and unrolled a few tweaks to its algorithm designed to negatively affect such spammers, while giving a boost to those websites following more honest practices and which seem to be of legitimate quality.

Of course this spelt absolute disaster for many who had intensively practiced such deceitful tactics, and many are still struggling to recover and save face in the eyes of google.

Link Exchanges

One strategy how to build backlinks is by exchanging links with other websites. You link to their page from yours, they link back to you, and you both benefit equally. Ideally, you want to exchange links with websites which are thematically related to yours. For example, if your website is about dog food, you will probably not want to exchange links with your direct competition, but perhaps with a dog food store in another city, or with a dog pound. Definitely not with a site about Viagra. The words on their website should be similar to the ones on yours.

But google caught onto this as well, so if you have a partner.html page from which you link to the homepages of your link exchange partners, while your partners have the same and from which they link to your home page, it looks a little obvious that this is manipulated and google can easily cancel out any positive affect from such an exchange, even though such a strategy worked in the past. Such a link is called a “two-way exchange”, and is easily discernable. You may still get some positive affect from it, but with the new rules probably not very much.

Ideally you want to work with three-way exchanges, such as if you link from a page in your domain to the homepage or deep page of your partner’s domain, while they would link from a page in that domain to a page of another domain you own. Or perhaps they would link to one of your partners, and they in turn link back to you. Such linking would not be so obvious and it would be difficult for google to consider as spam or discredit it.

Also, it is not so effective to link from a “partner” page, full of single links to all sorts of other pages, because google can easily understand the purpose of such a page and also discredit its value. Or simple links at the bottom of your pages pointing out in different directions.

No, the most powerful link would be directly from within the text of a page. Such as a long article about how to take care of a dog, with a link to your store when “dog food” is mentioned. Or perhaps you could create a sponsor box, with some brief text about dog food and link out from that. That way your readers will see it is an advertisement, not get offended if they click on “dog food” from within your text (because they might expect to read more and useful information about dog food – not just get pushed to some product sell), while google could perceive that as some other text within your article (although it might make some assumptions and partially discredit it).

There is a lot of talk on the internet now about backlinking and many have different opinions. I believe you simply need to be more careful and less obvious, but use your mathematical intuition to understand the limitations of any algorithm which google might develop to attack such practices. Best is to be subtle, but to whatever degree google decides to discredit a link, chances are it will not be discredited completely and it will always pay to focus on developing quality backlinks, than to do nothing.

However, one major problem in developing link exchanges, which can be a rather time consuming process, is if your link partner is dishonest and removes their link to you after some time, assuming you will not bother to constantly check that they are still linking back to you. If they remove their link to you, it means you are linking only to them, which is considered a one-way link – the most prized of all links.

Or another nasty trick is if they add a “nofollow” relation to their link to you. This is a command to the search engines not to follow the link to your website, meaning it is almost the same as removing the link. Except that you will still see it and may think your link partner remains honest.

There are several nasty tricks webmasters can use to bend the link exchange game in their favour, such as adding a NOINDEX or NOFOLLOW meta in their headers, which would essentially tell any search engine to ignore all the contents on that page.

Additionally, try not to arrange link exchanges when either of you are sending emails from a gmail account. Google owns gmail and, based on its privacy policy in the past, you can rest assured it might use your correspondence to hone in on link exchange agreements. Especially when you write in an email: “I’ll link from such and such a page, you link to this one of mine,” and within a week the respective links appear on your webpages.

Because it takes time to email with potential link exchange partners, find and approach potential partners, log your agreements somewhere and then add the link to one of your pages, it is a good idea to use a link exchange tool which would automate much of this work and immediately inform you as soon as a link partner tries something dishonest.

Free Online Reciprocal Link Exchange Checker
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Pages that Link to Translation Work Pay Well on Google


2012
06.16

Discussions Concerning Search Engine Optimization

Dear Sir or Madam , I work on a website that offers translation services; for example, legal contracts, official documentation and website translations and after perusing your website I am keen to host an advertisement on your site http://www.kenax.cz/ . I would be interested in placing a one-page advertisement on your website. I will provide a unique text for this advert that will be created by our professional writer for your site, in accordance with your editorial guidelines. It would be fantastic to hear back from you about this. I look forward to your reply.

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pictures-of-Thailand_036_1 (Photo credit: tree planting)

I’d like to point out that the two pages you have chosen are linked to from pretty well all of my 700 plus pages. These two are some of my most important pages and I’d like you to reconsider your discount.

This is my first time doing this and I’ve spent the last several days studying link exchanges. Did you say you wanted a link out from within my existing text or something (it is no problem for me to add more text, since I write fast and a lot), or is this a banner ad on the side? Do you pay one year in advance? Or can we break it down by month so I can try it out and see if it will negatively affect my rankings? Although I assume not because the two pages I would be linking to are translation related and have a fairly high PR.

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pictures-of-Thailand_036_36 (Photo credit: tree planting)

Would you consider more outlinks on other pages? All my pages are original content text, and I have recently started focusing on monetising them, where for a few years I was focusing more on the writing aspect and interlinking them. Do you have any suggestions how I can proceed? During my readings the last few days I learned that a lot of link exchange packages, especially those which use scripts and link out to spammers or something, can severely negatively affect my overall PR. Especially after some recent google upgrade. So I want to be careful. Obviously if some of these packages negatively affect my PR the outlinks I will have sold to you will become less attractive, for which reason your help would be appreciated.

Let’ have another link in this page: http://001yourtranslationservice.com/translating/translation-tips/translation-tips.html Place me links in the upper part of the website. About the price I want some discount in the price, as links are now going to be placed in the inner pages not in the homepage. I will pay you US $ 250 for 3 links, this is little bit compromise and I think you will accept this. For now let’s know me your thoughts.

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pictures-of-Thailand_035_3_16 (Photo credit: tree planting)

Okay, how about these: http://001yourtranslationservice.com/ translating/translation-tips/translation- tips.html Number one on google for Translation Tips, PR2 You mentioned http://www.kenax.cz/ – Translation Agency, PR3, I could also suggest: http://001yourtranslationservice.com/ translations/translation-resources.html 19 on google for Translation Resources, PR2, http://001yourtranslationservice.com/ translations/translation-jobs.html PR2 http://001yourtranslationservice.com/ translating/languages/languages-of-the-world.html PR2 http://christ.kenax.cz/ PR2 – but I guess that isn’t educational related enough Other PR2 pages you might consider: http://001yourtranslationservice.com/kenax/Translators/Resources/TimeZones.htm http://kenax.net/submit-add-url-suggest-website.html >

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pictures-of-Thailand_034_33A (Photo credit: tree planting)

Show me site that will have content specific and will Have minimum pr 2 . Yes the price was US $ 100 per year .

Subject: RE: Interested in placing one Full page advertisement I work as a third party for my clients. All are Education clients.

Hi Harry, so six outlinks in total was it? Three from kenax.cz and three from the Translation Tips? I’d rather not link out from the main 001 page because I am trying to get high in Translation related keywords with that particular page. Did you say a hundred dollars per year per link? I can also link out from http://kenax.net/companies-and-services/education/ a directory I’ve started which I am using for link exchanges. No charge but just a link exchange? I am also developing individual pages for each language, which seems education related.

I will want the links to be placed on this : http://001yourtranslationservice.com/ and if you will not be interested in linking me from this page you can link me from this inner page also http://001yourtranslationservice.com/translat ing/translation-tips/translation-tips.html . For now let me know how much is your expectation per link per year. Waiting for your reply on this .

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pictures-of-Thailand_034_4_01 (Photo credit: tree planting)

What would the ads promote? I am a bit pensive of adding it to my main entry page, as it may affect my keyword rankings, but it is possible. I also own the sister site at the bottom of this page (http://001yourtranslationservice.com/) and that has beneath it roughly 700 pages of original text. Are you only interested in the main entry pages? I spend almost full time on SEO and hope to give the various pages an html facelift. Eventually have others doing this work for me.

This will be a text link and not a Banner. The text link having 2 to 3 words maximum. And for this I will pay you per link/year US $ 100 and if you agree to this price then I will place 2 or more links . For now let me know your thoughts ..

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I am starting to get regular requests Oh Karel I’m so glad. I would hate to see you lose all the work you’ve done over the decades in building the translating company. I wasn’t really sure where you were going with all the SEO and alternate websites and stuff. I always considered the translating your bread and butter, and was worried you may be letting go of it to focus on other things. So this is really great, and I hope it grows into a steady flow of income! It’s Friday, so I’ll drink a beer for you tonight.

Right on and thanks. Yah, the SEO stuff was precisely a way how to find my own customers, especially international ones, so that I don’t have to rely on those dork Czechs, who always tear apart my translations and nickpick over bullshit and small points. They simply do not like letting me translate loosely and try to get me to translate Czechglish and closer to their sacred original, which is professionally insulting to me and which I refuse to do. Dealing with them can be a pain, I’m sick of their smugness, and many times they just don’t pay. So this SEO stuff was aimed at freeing myself from them. Especially stupid Czech translation agencies, which are the worst of all. I’m done with their stupid mentality. But while doing and learning all this stuff, it occurred to me that I could make money from it too. It has definitely been an interesting learning experience, and I feel that once I click in high enough on google, orders will be coming in all directions at once: translations for me, translations for my other translators, DTP, SEO, webpage design, programming… you name it.

pictures-of-Thailand_037_1_04

pictures-of-Thailand_037_1_04 (Photo credit: tree planting)

I’ve been masterminding it this way for several years, but you can imagine there was a lot to learn and experiment with. I imagine that many people must have thought I’m just wasting my time, but they just don’t see what I see, or the vision and overall strategy in my head. When I try to explain something like this to Jana and mom, they just roll their eyes, see that I have tattered clothes, and cant see anything beyond that. “He’s not making money, so he must be simply wrong.” Naïve and simple way of looking at things, but then again, for two people who I must have spent 3 days teaching how to copy/paste, or in the case of Jana, repeat over and over and over and over again how to check her email, I can only forgive them their ignorance. It’s not their fault. So I just quietly work away, as any perservering entrepeneur does, and wait for the day when my vision becomes reality, and then all the little folks around say, “congratulations. How did you do it? Connections through your daddy or something?”

 

+0200 Subject: success! cau dudes, had to share this with someone. So it seems that my Czech to English translations translator CV page is now near the top of google, ranking for example something like 6th for “Czech to English translator“. I am starting to get regular requests so I will focus more on this page, because I stopped about a month ago. Hopefully it will get higher. Now that I am getting requests from people in the west I can slowly start considering to raise my prices. People in the west are generally much happier with my service, because they know what English is supposed to sound like and are not dorks like Czechs who may know some English and complain that I have translated “so loosely”; and most importantly, they’re not assholes and most of the time actually pay me. So my plan now is to focus on this page more to get it higher. Once and if I start to get a lot of work, I will keep focusing on this, and eventually take some of my earnings to pay people to do the same for the billion other language combinations my agency offers, now that I know how to do it. A long term and expensive project but well worth it. This is a strategy I developed while treeplanting. Simple and practical. I guess for the past two years I’ve been focusing on my main translation page, which is in a much more competitive bracket. Even though I have gotten fairly high on google for “translation service”, it is better for me to focus on less competitive keywords like “Czech to Polish” or “German to English translations“, and work from the bottom up. Once the individual pages get high up in their individual keywords, by each of them pointing to my main page everything will slowly climb upwards in all the important keywords. A lot of work but I see the other big companies are doing the same thing. The important point is that I get translations for me, so I can build on something from the bottom. I don’t like the work but I can make good money at it, and then pay some expats etc. in Prague orShanghai to work on the other pages, because it really is a lot of work. Anyway, just wanted to share this latest success. latero

 

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pictures-of-Thailand_037_E (Photo credit: tree planting)

oh my goodness, I just did a random check and was shocked to find my 001yourtranslationservice thing number one on google for the keyword “translation service”. Can you check how it looks on your end? Seems like my strategies are working. Anyway, started downloading a bunch of software and think it will only get better. Also some ebooks on the subject. If I make money one day will buy the software that I found useful. Anyway, really curious all that I will learn and accomplish over the next month.

mmmm, sorry man, on google.ca you’re on the middle of page 5 (which is still pretty good, I mean you’re competing against Google Translate and stuff), but for google.com you’re right at the top of page 3 which is pretty fantastic. [Turns out that I must not be logged into google to yield the same results for others, so use a different browser, like Opera for example, to research this alone. Never follow/click on any of the results, otherwise that browser too will start to remember what you like and distort the results accordingly.] I’m off to Cancun for just a few days very early tomorrow morning, back at midnight Wednesday. Won’t be checking email or doing anything remotely work-related while I’m gone.yeahyeahyeahyeahYEAH fun and sun for me!-Keta From:

Strange about the difference. Surprisingly a lot. Anyway, think things will only be going uphill from here so maybe I’ll ask you again in a few months.

Have a good one in the sun!

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