David Leonhardt’s SEO and Social Media Marketing

In my review of the “Free Traffic System” (FTS), I recommended spinning manually your articles before submitting them through FTS or through any other article submission program. And I promised to share with you some advance spinning tips. This blog post is divided into two parts:

1. Why manual spinning is superior to an automated spinning program.

2. Exactly what to do to manually spin an article – my advanced spinning tips.

For those who are new to this topic, let me quickly review what spinning is. Those already in the know can skip to the first sub-heading below.

The [spin]beautiful|wonderful[/spin] thing about [spin]nature|outdoors[/spin] is the fresh feeling you get.

The sentence above is, technically, four different sentences. When this sentence is fed through an article submitter that recognizes spin code (This is the particular syntax used in FTS, but the principle is universal), it comes out as four different “unique” sentences at four different article directories or blogs:
The wonderful thing about outdoors is the fresh feeling you get.
The wonderful thing about nature is the fresh feeling you get.
The beautiful thing about outdoors is the fresh feeling you get.
The beautiful thing about nature is the fresh feeling you get.

The math is simple: two words, each with two options, creates 4 “unique” sentences. The value in this is to ensure that the hundreds of articles pointing back to your site are not duplicate content, which is supposed to be frowned upon by the search engines’ algorithms. Try this one:

The [spin]beautiful|wonderful|amazing[/spin] thing about [spin]nature|outdoors[/spin] is the fresh feeling you get.

Two words multiplied by three options gives 6 “unique” sentences. Why do I put “unique” in quotation marks? That’s in the next section, but the theory of spinning leads to the conclusion that you are getting past whatever duplicate content filter the search engines might place on the pages linking back to your website. One more…

The [spin]beautiful|wonderful|amazing[/spin] thing about [spin]nature|outdoors[/spin] is the fresh [spin]feeling|sensation[/spin] you get. A [spin]holiday|vacation|trip[/spin] out of doors will [spin]refresh|relax|reinvigorate|benefit[/spin] you more than you can [spin]imagine|dream[/spin].

The concept of article spinning, just to belabour the point one more time, holds that just with this one paragraph spun as above, there will be 192 “unique” articles (3x2x2x2x4x2) on 192 websites, each one pointing links back to your website.

That is spinning in a nutshell.

Why bother spinning articles manually?

Before I dive into the benefits of manually spinning, as opposed to using one of the automated or semi-automated article spinners on the market, a big CAVEAT: This is a strategic issue. This is not a rule. Follow my logic, then make your decision, because there are trade-offs involved. Trade-offs of quantity versus quality. Trade-offs of long term results versus crash-and-burn-results. With a bonus of risk assessment thrown in for good measure.

Article spinning: the story so far…

A) Once upon a time, people would submit articles to the article directories. To both of them, in fact. Search engines loved these content-based links, and all was good.

B) Then, people got smart. Because these were good links that helped sites rank better, more people started writing more articles and more article directories sprang up. Search engines loved these content-based links, and all was good.

C) But people loved these more and more and more and more and the number of articles was multiplying and multiplying and people got even more clever and created submission software so that even more articles could be distributed in a fraction of the time. Ah, the miracle of automation.

And spammers just love miracles and they love automation. Ah, the curse of automation!

This would be a good time to refresh your memory of what search engines are all about. Which is, of course, making money. To make money, they need eyeballs. To keep eyeballs, they need lots of people really liking the search results they deliver, which is why they have meticulously crafted and carefully guarded algorithms. Do they care if people try to maipulate their results? Not really. Do they care if people succeed at manipulating their results? You bet! Let’s look at the three steps above from a search engine company’s perspective:

A) So what?

B) So what?

C) Wait a second, massive link-building can skew our results. Automation makes link-building scalable, especially to spammers, and needs to be balanced out of our algorithms.

And so, the effectiveness of duplicate content in article submissions was (as best we can determine through the observation of thousands) reduced to very little.

A) So people started manually spinning their articles to avoid duplicate content.

B) And some smart person came up with a lazy way to spin, using automation.

C) Spammers, being inherently lazy, caught wind of this as did everyone else, and now everybody is spinning their articles using automation.

And the search engines’ reactions?

A) So what?

B) So what?

C) Wait a second, massivearticle-spinning can skew our results. Automation makes article-spinning scalable, especially to spammers, and needs to be balanced out of our algorithms.

We don’t know if C) has happened yet or whether it’s on its way, but I can tell you with 99.9% certainty that it is not far away.

At this point, I know that some readers who are using automated spinning programs will dispute this, typically saying, “Well, it’s worked for me so far.” I can’t even begin to count the number of times I have heard this line about one link-building technique or another shortly before the search engines have taken step C. Before webmaster forums are filled with the gnashing of teeth from all the people whose websites lost rankings. If you want to build your rankings based on the past (as most people who call themselves “SEO expert” seem to), you can stop reading here.

What I can tell you about the past is that one pattern has proven enduring, and that is the same pattern as you will see in the stock market: when everyone is rushing to buy, that is the time to sell (before the crash). When a particular linking method becomes so scalable through automation that even the spammers are doing it, stop sinking more resources into it.

Let us look, then, more specifically at automated article spinning. It does offer a very seductive advantage over manual spinning. It can be done quickly. In fact, a typical testimonial for article spinning software would be, “It took me minutes to do what it used to take me all day.” So you can do 5-10 articles in the time it takes to do one. The advantage is quantity.

But does it give quality? The very simple spinning examples I gave above in my intro all replace single words with synonyms. Here is a screenshot pitching one popular automated article spinner program:

They create “unique” articles, but do they create unique articles. Well, I guess if you can’t find a thesaurus, they create hundreds of unique articles. But what if Google and Bing have thesauruses? What if megalithic Google’s and Bing’s computing power, funded by millions of dollars of capital, is somehow bigger than the computing power of your little $70 article spinning software? Sure, unlikely…but what if? Let’s face it, those four sentences I used as an example in my introduction are not unique – they use synonyms, but they remain the same sentence…and any algorithm drawing data from a thesaurus can see that faster than you or I can.

So quality versus quantity. And when the search engines do devalue duplicate content links with the help of a simple thesaurus, it becomes long-term results versus crash-and-burn results, as all those “unique” links you’ve built are suddenly worth less (not necessarily worhtless, but worth less).

But I also mentioned risk assessment earlier. So let’s imagine for a moment that a search engine sees that you have 573 identical articles pointing to your site. Let’s further imagine that the search engine has identified that these are not organically identical, but identical by virtue of synonym manipulation. In other words, duplicate content, disguised as non-duplicate content to try to trick the search engines. If there is one thing we know about Google (and I can only surmise it is likewise with Bing), is that is punishes blatant attempts to trick it – hidden text, doorway pages, concealed links. Perhaps also fake unique articles?

I leave it to you to determine whether Google would consider this deceptive and whether they would do something about it – whether automated article spinning is just poor quality work or whether it actually places your website at risk.

How to manually spin your article

To do what I would consider a quality spin, you need to create articles that are significantly different. By significant, I mean more than just replacing words with their synonyms. In the extreme, this means writing from scratch a brand new article for each place it appears. Yup, one for each of those 573 article directories. Look up the word “unique” in the dictionary.

For those of us who don’t have 1500 hours in a day, the extreme option is not an option. Below is my guide to what I believe is effective in creating articles that are unique, rather than just “unique” with what I view as a reasonable amount of grunt work. Who knows if I am being paranoid or just over-cautious — or perhaps I am not creating articles that are unique enough and these might still be seen as duplicate by a search algorithm. Take what you want and leave the rest.

The title is the most important part of the article to make unique, as it often appears in <title> tags, in a page’s URL, in <H> tags and in links to the page. This is the one place where I’ll sit down and write 100 options from scratch, trying for many variations of style.

Because I am partially lazy, I usually start out with a few styles, such as:

6 ways to enjoy your villa rental
Why a villa rental is tops in accommodation
Villa or hotel?
Choose a vacation villa over a hotel or motel
Six reasons villas are tops
The villa choice for luxury

Then I will rewrite each one, mixing up several elements. For instance, here are some rewrites of the first style:

Six reasons to enjoy your rental villa
Six ways to enjoy your vacation rental villa
6 reasons to enjoy your private villa rental
Six ways to enjoy your private vacation villa
6 ways to enjoy your private rental villa

The first sentence is pretty important, so I tend to write 3 or 4 versions of it in completely different styles…

When you use your credit card, it would be worth stopping to remember that credit card issuers are businesses with shareholders.

Who issues your credit card? A business, of course.

Some folks view credit card issuers almost like quasi-government institutions. Not a chance. They are businesses like any others.

Notice that I totally reworded the first sentence. Each example sets up the second sentence equally well, but notice that the three options are different length, even different number of sentences and, of course, totally different wording. These are completely unique. Mix up not just individual words, but the sentence structure itself.

Do the same for entire paragraphs. Take a paragraph, then rewrite it so that it is shorter. Then rewrite it so that it is two paragraphs. Use some of the same wording if you are feeling rushed or lazy, but remember that the more you change the better.

At least once in your article, rewrite a long paragraph as a short paragraph followed by a bullet list. It helps to create a few versions of the list, changing the order of the bullets and even removing some of them in some versions. Bullet lists are often the easiest to play around with.

When rewriting a word, don’t always choose a single word as a replacement option. For example…

When rewriting a word, don’t always choose a single word as a [spin]replacement option|replacement|replacement option in your article|replacement option, but try to add in more text so that some versions of the article are truly different and unique[/spin].

When creating options, more is better. In 5. above, the example has four options, much better than two. There is a time versus uniqueness trade-off here, but if you can create more than just two or three options, especially in the first few paragraphs, it helps make your articles more unique.

Let’s end with one of the most important places to have variation – your linked text. As much variation around your keywords as possible…but you probably already know that from other link-building efforts. Vary the actually links (link to different pages of your website in different versions, if appropriate), vary the link text, very the surrounding text and vary the order of your links (in some, the home page might be the first link, so make it the second link in others).

Nothing I have had to say here should be taken as “The Truth”. It is my best assessment of the most effective compromise between various trade-offs, based on my experience in SEO since 2003. I just hope it is helpful for people who might seek a similar balance between quantity and quality…and don’t want their “Yippee!”s turn into wailing at the next major algorithm shake-up.

SUMMARY: The Free Traffic System is NOT what the name sounds like. It is an effective platform to build editorial links on keyword-relevant pages across multiple domains of mixed quality. And it’s free.

Readers who know me well might be forgiven for raising their eyebrows at something called “Free Traffic System“. After all, I am probably the person you know who most vociferously opposes any SEO approach that involves automation. So I should lay to rest that I am not reviewing a “system” in the sense of what it might sound like. In fact, I think the word “platform” would be more appropriate.

Some of you surely still have your eyebrows raised because you know I put little stock in all those traffic machines that send huge swathes of untargeted traffic, which for most niches is pretty useless . The fact is that this “system” does not send any “traffic” directly. Traffic does result from the promotion it helps you do, but this really is a system – er, I mean … a “platform” for promotion of your website, your company, your credibility, your blog posts, etc.

If you’ve let down your eyebrows, get ready to raise them again, because this world-renowned cheapskate who avoids paying for any SEO or promotional tools he can possibly get away with, has just upgraded to the “Pro” version of the Free Traffic System, which is not cheap by anyone’s measure. However, after using the free version these past two months, I have been impressed enough that I am convinced it is worth paying (against my cheapskate instincts) for the even more effective Pro version. So, yes, technically it’s free (but no longer for me). But more importantly, it’s effective. And it’s even more effective (I’ll explain how later) when you upgrade to Pro.

(Complete disclosure at the end of this post.)

Free Traffic System could use a name change

So this really should not be called the Free Traffic System (I know a name like that sells in the Internet Marketing community, but it cheapens what is in fact a much more sophisicated approach); it should be called the Effective Promotion Platform. Right. I shall petition the owner for a name change. In the meantime, let me tell you…

• what FTS does
• how it works
• who can benefit most
• any downsides?
• the differences between the free and pro versions

Please keep in mind as you read this that the process is NOT automated. I might call it semi-automated, but really the only automated part is distribution. The really big time-saving is in searching for link-building opportunities. What FTS gives you is instant access, saving hundreds of hours of searching for linking opportunities.

In simplest terms, the Free Traffic System is a platform for spreading your content across multiple blogs run by multiple owners. It is a cross between article distribution and guest blogging. The basic steps are as follows.

1. You create content, much as you would for article distribution.
2. You fill in the forms, much as you would for article distribution.
3. You select the blogs you want your content to appear on.
4. The bloggers decide whether to accept your content.

Step #4 is a crucial step to keep in mind. You do get instant access to the blogs, saving hours of searching; you do not get guaranteed or automatic access. It means two things.

First, the bloggers are folks like you and me – a myriad of blog owners around the world, with a myriad of domains across a myriad of IP addresses. Take note, that is important for SEO.

Second, if you submit crap, they won’t accept your “guest post”, so it really is worth investing the time and/or money in creating good quality articles.

Detailed review of the Free Traffic System process

Let’s look at the process in more detail, because there are some elements built in that might seem small, but are nevertheless very important.

The first information that goes into the submission for are the URLs and the anchor text.

As you can see by the screenshot, you are allowed two links per submission in the free version of the Free Traffic System. That might be your home page and a link to a specific blog post or product in your eCommerce site.

Notice how both the fields have height? You can add as many keyword variations for each link as you want, and each one will become the anchor text for the link. What this means is that if you add 5 different “keywords”, one fifth of the blogs you submit to will feature each keyword as an anchor text. From an SEO perspective, this is great because we all know that anchor text variation at least to some degree is important. The one caveat is that all the variations have to fit into the same spot in the text of your article.

Even more interesting is that you can have multiple URLs for your two links. What this means is that if you add 2 different URLs for one of the links, half the blogs you submit to will feature each URL. This works only when the anchor text can be used interchangeably between the two URLs. For instance, we have a page about book writers and another page about ghost writers. We could put both of the URLs into the %LINK2% field, and include keywords that easily apply to both URLs. From an SEO perspective, this is great because we add variety and spread the deep-link love better across the domain.

The title is crucial

Next we enter the title of the post. From an SEO perspective, the title is important because it is often used for …

• The post title
• The page title <title>
• File name
• Internal linking anchor text
• Anchor text from external links

From a duplicate content perspective, then, it is crucial that each instance of the article have a different title. There is special code (easy as pie, don’t worry) to “spin” the title so that you have a different title on each blog you submit to. The image below shows a part of the code and some of the variations that are spun out of it.

Please note that you still have to use your brain to input the information, which is then automatically spun into multiple variations the information you input, not your brain).

The example above is what I would consider the lazy way to do it. The title is worth more effort than that, and in a future blog post I will share some advanced spinning tips. In the meantime, this works.

Content is truly king

The next step is to submit the content, the body of your article. What should you write about? If you are a blogger, take any of your recent blog posts and rewrite them. You need at least 450 words to qualify for both your links.

If you suck at writing, we can write a very high-quality post for you; please let me know. If you are even more of a cheapskate than I am, you can go to Freelancer.com for articles but be warned – quality counts if you want your article to be accepted, and when it comes to writing, you get what you pay for.

Now you are ready to submit…No, wait! Not yet. There are two things you need to do to your content before pasting it into the form.

First, you need to inset your two links. One of the really exciting things about the Free Traffic System is that your links are not consigned to a “resource box” after the end of your article. You can place your links wherever they fit. I strongly advise placing them at different parts of the text, at least one of them in the first half of your post. This sort of placement tends to be more valuable from an SEO perspective (these are often called “editorial links” – look it up).

Second, you would do well to spin your article or at least parts of it, so that you are not submitting identical content to 30 different blogs. There are automated spinners (Yuck!) that spew out, well, what you would expect a machine to spew out. FTS offers a convenient link to one of them. It does take time to manually spin an article (at least an hour the way I do it), but I believe this is highly valuable for long-term SEO value.

However, automatic spinning is better than no spinning at all – just double-check the quality. In a future blog post, as I mentioned above, I will share some advanced spinning tips.

Now you are ready to submit it and preview various versions of it. Each time you hit preview…

You will see different anchor text for your two links, and you will see different versions of your article if it has been spun.

Choose your tag(s)

Next, you get to enter one tag in the free version, so make it the most relevant keyword. If you know anything about blogs and tags, you will immediately understand the value of this from an SEO perspective. I won’t go into the explanation here.

Now comes the fun part (What, haven’t you been having fun yet?) OK, OK, you got me there. I love to write, so for me the fun part was actually up front. But we are now at the action part. You’ve written your content. You’ve filled in the form. Now it’s time for you to…

Select your blogs

This is done by entering keywords into the field…

The Free Traffic System will then spit out a list of blogs and categories within blogs that contain the words you listed. For instance, in the example they offer, you will get a list that includes every blog with “finance”, “money” or “loan” in its title OR with a category name that includes “finance”, “money” or “loan”. The image below gives an example for you.

A few things you can see right away. You get to see the titles of the blog and the titles of the categories, but that’s all. No eyeball test for quality (there is an obvious reason for that). No PageRank data (that would be a nice easy feature to integrate, but I suppose it would lead to too much clustering and it might actually be better this way).

Based on the titles, you can pretty much tell if a blog/category is appropriate for your article. You get to select one category in each blog, up to a maximum of 30 blogs in the free version. If you choose wide, sweeping terms (like “money” and “finance”, for example), you might end up with too many to choose from. If you choose terms that are too narrow (like “payday loans” and “cashflow”) you likely won’t have enough choice. Once you’ve played around with the system a bit, you’ll find the right balance.

Since you can’t tell what quality a blog is before you choose it, is it really worthwhile? Yes. If you have written good quality content and targeted the right blogs and the right categories effectively, your article will be accepted. I just took a look at my stats for an article I submitted12 days ago (while I was still using the free version). So far, 26 blogs accepted, there was one error in communication and three blogs are yet to be accounted for. Not bad. Plus, these are keyword relevant links on keyword relevant pages on keyword relevant (or at least topical) websites.

Once the article is live, you can search Google, Yahoo and Bing for it, and you can see the value of the various blogs. My experience is that there is a wide range of quality and PageRank, some cluttered with Google ads and some crisp and clean. Some that nobody reads, some that have an active community. Some that just sit there, and some that are promoted on Twitter and FaceBook.

And they are all worthwhile, because you want links from a variety of quality websites, not just from top-ranking ones. Read my counterintuitive post on why you want sucky links, too.

Who benefits most from the Free Traffic System?

The obvious answer is anyone who is building links. This is a nice addition into the mix, to keep getting a variety of different links from different websites on keyword-relevant pages. However, if you are a blogger or someone currently submiting to article directories, you can benefit even more, because you’ve already done the work of researching and writing, all you have to do is tweak the article and submit.

The other type of website that really benefits from this type of platform are hard-core commercial websites, such as eCommerce or brick-and-mortar companies with boring websites (you know, industrial services like machine tooling or sanitation or backhoes). These types of sites are hard to attract natural links (unless you are extemely clever about link-bait), so this makes a welcome addition to the link-building opportunities.

Are there any downsides to the Free Traffic System?

There are always downsides, and even a wonderful tool used improperly can be ineffective, possibly even dangerous. If you rely only on one link-building method, it is much less effective than a multi-facetted approach.

FTS should be part of your link-building strategy, not the whole thing or even the major part of it. You still need to create great content on your own site. You still need to attract links to that content. You should still submit to directories and comment on blogs. You should still exchange links with related, non-competing websites. You should still do social bookmarking and spread your content on Twitter and FaceBook. You should still post to forums and answer questions online.

If you don’t spin your content or spin it poorly, you might end up with a lot of duplicate content – probably not enough to get your website banned, but enough that it will probably drag down your rankings.

Why did I pay to upgrade to the Pro version?

There are many reasons to upgrade to the Pro version of Free Traffic System from the Free version, and as you might guess they are all on the website in a slick sales pitch. Don’t be fooled; there is only one reason, and that is mucho more links. Sure, they promise a bunch of future benefits. Nobody upgrades for that. They promise faster review and support, but my experience is that they give fantastic turn-around time even to free members.

No, there is one reason why someone would upgrade, and that’s for the extra links. Let’s do a little math. Here is a quick comparison of the three elements where Pro members get a better deal than Free members:

FREE: two links in each article
PRO: three links in each article

FREE: one tag for each article
PRO: five tags for each article

FREE: each article submitted to 30 blogs
PRO: each article submitted to 50 blogs

How does this all add up?

FREE:

Each article has two links. The article appears typically on its own page, a page in the main blogstream, a page for the tag you define, a page for the category you choose, and a monthly archive page. So that’s two links on five pages, for a total of 10 links. Let’s suppose your article gets picked up by all 30 blogs, each with 10 links …that equals 300 links across 30 domains. In real life, there will be errors. For instance, in my example above, I got 260 links across 26 domains. Not bad considering I paid nothing, it took me only a couple hours, and these are valuable one-way editorial links (including laser targeted deep links).

But check this out…

PRO:

Each article has three links. The article appears typically on its own page, a page in the main blogstream, one page for each of the five tags you define, a page for the category you choose, and a monthly archive page. So that’s three links on nine pages, for a total of 27 links. Let’s suppose your article gets picked up by all 50 blogs, each with 27 links …that equals 1350 links across 50 domains. From a single article. Wow! Of course, in real life, there will be errors. But for my money (and I did pay!), this is worth upgrading for. The funny thing is that on the Free Traffic System website, they claim that a Pro member can gain up to 900 links per article. Huh? Why are they underselling themselves?

I asked, and was granted, permission to embed their upgrade promo video on my blog, so here it is:

So in summation, I highly recommend this to webmasters, bloggers and link-builders. It is a quick and easy way to add a ton of one-way editorial backlinks with a very small amount of work.

My one BIG caveat is to not get seduced by how easy it is. Do it right, so that it really works for you. And keep doing other forms of link-building, even if this seems easier and more effective, because you want a great variety of different types of links.

Disclosure statement: The links to Free Traffic System in this post are affiliate links. That means that if you click through and sign up, I benefit. This in no way influenced my recommendation; I first decided to pay for the upgrade, then decided to add the affiliate links (I would be crazy not to!) You don’t have to use those links to sign up, but obviously I would be extremely grateful if you do. Thank you.

A lot of SEO specialists and webmasters frequently check their link partners for those elusive missing links. We call them “SEOthropologists”.

Earlier this year, I speculated on how the search engines treat NoFollow links.  For those who might be a little green, NoFollow links are not totally ignored by the search engines.  For those who really, really green, NoFollow links are believed to be totally ignored by the search engines (because they have the rel=”nofollow” attribute in the link code).

So we ran a little experiment. 

A client of ours had a fully developed website that has never been used.  Not a single link points to this website, so in the eyes of the search engines, it should not exist. 

It was not indexed at Yahoo. It should go without saying that Yahoo displayed no backlinks.

The site was indexed at Google.  (How, why and whether Google should index orphan sites that have not been released to the public is a topic for another post.) Google showed no backlinks, but the site did rank #8 at Google for one very important search, based primarily on the name of the domain. It did not show up in the top 100 for a few other key searches. All searches are for local terms specific to a certain city, so they are moderately low competition.

For three weeks, we posted comments on NoFollow blogs (yes, intelligent comments reflecting the specific content of the blog posts) to create a steady stream of NoFollow links, without creating any DoFollow or “normal” hyperlinks.

Were the NoFollow links followed?

At the end of week 4, we found Yahoo had indexed the website and showed 51 backlinks.  All of these are NoFollow links. The more important searches were all showing in the top 20, one as high as position #6. Remember that these are moderately low-competition, local searches, but this is all on the strength of a few weeks of exclusively NoFollow links.

Google showed no backlinks after 4 weeks.  No surprise there; Google is very sporadic with if, when, how and which sampling of backlinks it chooses to display. The ranking at position #8 had not changed, but a couple other search terms were now ranking at Google, one of them as high as position #11. Again, this is exclusively on the strength of NoFollow blog comments.

What can we conclude about NoFollow links?

NoFollow links still obviously count at Yahoo.  Do they count as much as DoFollow links?  A more complicated experiment might help answer that question.  Anyone feel like taking up the challenge?

NoFollow links also appear to count at Google.  Or perhaps some do and others don’t, depending on other factors Google might use to rate links from specific domains. However, we can be sure that Google does follow at least some NoFollow links.

The conclusion I would draw from this is that people really should not focus on the NoFollow/DoFollow issue. Build links that are officially followable when you can, but don’t let a NoFollow attribute in a page’s links dissuade you from creating a link you would otherwise pursue.

A while back, I wrote about why to ignore three-way link requests.  Many of the reasons I listed had to do with the quality of the site linking back to you.  But what if it’s a PR3 home page.  Sounds like a juicy link to score, doesn’t it?  Well, maybe not.  I don’t want to pick on one domain or another, but I need an example, so the one that came in today will do.  In the words of the link-exchanger:

Mate its PR 3 schoolsprepared.org

 

Check it again..not throwaway…

There are so many domains like this, and while a link from that page might not carry zero value, it’s caveat emptor.  Here are seven reasons why this is not a ” Wow! A PR3 home-page link!”

The domain will get dumped.Like so many others, this domain used to be a real website, but no longer. One glance at it with naked eyes shows that it was nicely set up and had a purpose. It accumulated a PageRank of 3, which means it was somewhat active on the Internet. And like so many others, the owners bailed out and sold the domain to someone who thought a PR3 website would be great for three-way link exchanges. So what happens once the site is “used up”? Once it is so stuffed with links that it is no longer useful for attracting link-exchanges, what do you think will happen to that website (and your link on it)? Come on, be honest, do you really trust that they will continue to maintain the website?

The page will fail to keep up. Let’s suppose they do maintain the website, honestly remaining committed to protecting the link they posted to your website, as promised. How long will the page remain PR3. Remember, PageRank is relative; as the total number of web pages and the total number of links on the Internet increase, so too does the link juice required to maintain a given PageRank. But the owners are not building links to this site; they are building links to another site.

The page will not attract new links. The eyeball test tells you this is a link farm. Even if it isn’t technically a link farm, it looks like one on first glance. Nobody will want to link to it. No bloggers. No industry sites. Nobody. The owner could be less careless and format the links nicely. But, as with most such situations, the owners did not.

The page will suffer link attrition. OK, let’s take this one step further. Over time, all websites suffer from link-attrition. That is to say, links die every day (websites close down, links pages are cleaned up, links get pushed deeper and deeper on directory pages, etc.), and links pointing to the page your link is on will die. In the case of a website that looks cheap like this, it stand to suffer accelerated attrition, as some websites linking to it will remove their links when they realize what they are now linking to.

No targeted traffic. As Yura Filimonov pointed out to me, sites like this won’t deliver targeted traffic.  Anyone who lands on such a page will quickly see that it is useless and back out the door.  Of course many links don’t deliver much traffic, but one of the benefits expected from a home page link is some targeted traffic.

PageRank will be diluted. Eventually there will be dozens, maybe hundreds of links on the page. The PR from PR3 (what’s left of it) will be diluted before the domain gets recycled, is dumped or simply disappears.

You are not fooling the search engines. If I can see with a glance that this is a flipped website turned link farm, do you really believe that Google and Yahoo are being fooled? Please, don’t flatter me; I know they are smarter than I am.

“So, OK, David…would my link on a page like this place my website at risk?” you ask.

I doubt it.  If you have 100 inbound links and 80 of them are from home page link farms, that might throw up a pretty big red flag.  But if you have a dozen links on silly pages like this amongst 500 links of various quality, I can’t imagine it harming your rankings.  Just don’t go jumping for joy thinking you’ve struck gold.  You’ve just found a penny.

Related reading on a humerous note: a spammer link exchange note.

“So if I understand correctly,
you want to offer me a minor league bench-warmer
in exchange for one of my star players?”

Like you, we are inundated with link requests. Some are worthwhile; some are not. Obviously if the topics are way off base, we don’t pay any further attention. If the topic is on-base, we give the site a quick eyeball test.

But what do you do when a three-way link is requested? Just to understand correctly, a three way link is when a webmaster or hired gun requests a link from your site to their site, and offer in exchange a link from another website altogether.

Here are nine solid reasons to ignore such emails…

There is more work up front, because there are two websites to evaluate for one linking opportunity. Given the relatively few worthwhile requests, it really is not worth having to work twice as hard to decide whether to pay further attention, when you can work many times less hard by just deleting.

As a general rule, three-way linking requests are on average of a lower quality than straight two-way swaps. So there is even more incentive to delete the message rather than work twice as hard to review it.

Most three-way link requests want you to give a link from your high-quality website (your star player), but offer you a link from their low-quality website (their bench-warmer). If they are not interested in linking back from their quality site, why should you even bother?

The website they are promoting is the one they want a link to, naturally. Over time, as they build ever more links, a link from that site will become valuable. They offer a link from a site they are not promoting, which through attrition will become less valuable. Yet they are asking you to link to them from the site you are promoting and making more valuable. Fair? I think not.

Very often the website they want to link to you from is not even theirs. Very often, it belongs to a linking specialist they have hired. The linking website in most of those cases exists solely to provide reciprocal links, making is not only poor quality, but also expendable; when the linking campaign is over, the hired guns have no interest in keeping your link, poor quality as it is, live.

With alarming regularity, three-way link requests come in offering return links from the same website, often a directory. Link to Site A and get a link back from PainInTheButtDirctory.com. The next day, link to Site B and get a link back from PainInTheButtDirctory.com. The next day, link to Site C and get a link back from PainInTheButtDirctory.com. The next day, link to Site D and get a link back from PainInTheButtDirctory.com. It’s actually kind of amusing in an annoying, make-them-stop sort of way.

Contrary to popular opinion, a three-way link does not fool Google and Yahoo, at least not if it is done on any measurable scale. If a website has a high percentage of inbound links from websites that are all linked to from the same website or family of websites…well, let’s just say that the one thing huge data processors are expert at is recognizing patterns. ‘nough said.

Do the search engines value three-way links more than two way links? Some people swear by it. I have no data to back up the assumption I am about to share with you, and I could be very wrong. However, I suspect that the search engines see two-way link swaps as both a means of boosting link popularity sometimes and as a means of partnership marketing sometimes. What percentage probability they attribute to which characteristic is likely based on features of the linking pages. However, when there is a three-way linking pattern detected, I am pretty sure the search engines would attribute close to 100% probability that the links are solely to manipulate their ranking of your website. When else do you ever hear of three-way linking? I suspect that these links are seen as fairly dark gray-hat SEO, if not black hat.

The very last place you want to be found in is in a link directory that is solely used for three-way links. It’s like waving a big red flag and calling out, “Hey there, Google. Yoohoo, Yahoo. Lookit me. I’m messing with your rankings.” Is that the message you want to send the search engines about your website.

Are there legitimate three-way link requests? I have to add this footnote, because there is nothing black and white, not even SEO hats. There are some rare situations where a brand new website approaches us with a link request. They know that their links page carries no weight and might not even be indexed or cached by the search engines. In other words, they know they have nothing of value to offer in return. So they offer a link from another website. This happens rarely, but when it is specified that this is the reason, I usually take the time to look at their website and consider their offer. And, assuming the site seems worthwhile, I sometimes ask for a link back from their “worthless” page, knowing that over time it will be worthwhile…and in many cases more so than the third-party link page that seems more worthwhile in the short term.

I’ve been tagged in a meme.  I think I was tagged sometime a ago in one, but this time I’m paying attention for a few reasons:

1. It’s a good chance to tell you about the linking benefits of participating in memes.
2. I was tagged by SEOAly (Alysson Fergusson), the Sunshine of Twitter
3. SEOAly might get to go free to the IM Spring Break conference (and surely bring back some great notes for me, since I don’t have time to attend)

The concept of a meme is quite simple.  At heart it’s a tag-you’re-it game, where one blogger “tags” several others by linking to them.  Their role then is to link back to the person who tagged them, and then tag additional bloggers.  If you can visualize the linking diagram, you can see the benefits this brings to your blog and to the blogs of your friends and associates. 

If a large part of SEO is making your website well-connected across the Internet, a meme helps establish the community of like websites.

So to participate in this meme, I am supposed to link back to SEOAly, link to the IM Spring Break meme page, list 7 things you expect to happen at IM Spring Break, then tag as many people as possible.  (I will cheat on that last one; I’ll tag just a few people who have been readers of this blog whom I think might not yet have been tagged by someone else.)

What will happen at IM Spring Break.

1. I will miss 100% of the sessions, because I’ll be back home working for my clients.
2. I will miss Chris Winfield’s insightful presentation, but I will get to contribute to it when he seeks input via Twitter as he did for his Lawyers on Twitter presentation last month.
3. Several words that I can’t repeat here, in case my kids ever read this, will punctuate an equally insightful presentation by Sugarrae Hoffman.
4. Jordan Kasteler aka Utah SEO Pro will get even with the IM Spring Break organizers by going 100% dry all conference.
5. SEOAly will attend, thanks in part to this blog post.
6. SEOAly will bring back notes for everyone she tagged.
7. I will run out of ideas before I get to #7.

So, let’s tag Wilson Raynopss, Peter Lee, Mr Javo, Communibus and Barry Welford just for fun.

Is a meme a good way for you to spread the word, too?

Do you trade links with PR0 pages?  Once upon a time I avoided PR0 pages.  It was usually a sign that a web page was being penalized or suffering from some contagious tropical disease.

But times have changed, and my approach has changed with the times.  In recent months I have seen a lot of “links” pages with PR0 value on the Google Toolbar.  This includes pages that are linked to from every page of otherwise PR4-PR5 websites.  PR0 in the Google Toolbar is n o longer, in my opinion, a kiss of death.

If I am offered a link from a PR0 page, the first thing I do is give it the old eyeball test.  If it has a lot of the wrong kind of links and the wrong kind of spammy words all over it, that ends it there.  But if the page looks good (on topic, manually-maintained, etc.)  apart from the lack of a green bar, I take a look at the home page of the site to see if it has a green bar and to see what the path is to the link page.  Is it linked to from the home page, from the template, from a second level page?  

In other words, I’ll make my own call at roughly what the value of the page is.  And given the error-prone toolbar that is at best an approximation anyway, I am sure my calculation isn’t that far off.  

Is this process more work than just looking at the toolbar?  Yes.  But when the toolbar is blank, the only alternative to this process is to just ignore what could be a good link.  Given how hard we work to find good, on-topic links, I think the work is worth it.

You can easily tweet this post by clicking reTWEET this

Three months ago, I wrote about how offline links count, too.  I recounted the story about how hard it was for me to enter a contest, because of the typo in the URL on a printed flyer.  Well, it seems the contest is on again.  Yesterday, I received a new flyer in the mail from the Lake Placid folks with a new entry code and…the correct URL.

How will this new flyer by viewed by people?  We can only speculate, but here are some possibilities.

• People who did not try to enter before will most likely see this as brand new, so the gaffe would not affect them.
• Some people who did not try to enter last time might remember the previous flyer, in which case it served as branding and might increase the person’s likelihood of entering this time.
• People who tried to enter last time might try again.
• People who entered last time might figure it’s a waste of time to try this time.
• Many people might not try to enter the contest, but they will get the message to visit upstate New York, which is the whole point of the contest.

There will probably be plenty of people who fall into each of these categories, and perhaps some others, too.  Hopefully for the resorts involved in the mailing, most of it will be positive.

And I’ll bet they spend more money on proofreading in the future!

Dear reader, let me be a heretic once more.

We all know, or at least assume, that having multiple links to the same URL from a domain is an exercise in diminishing returns as far as search engine rankings are concerned.  That is to say, if you score a link to your home page from one page on a domain, any additional links to your home page from other pages on that same domain are worth less.  And the more links to your home page from that domain, the less each one is worth.

This makes sense.  If a domain has 1000 pages, a sitewide link cannot be viewed as 1000 endorsements for your home page.

But the web is a changing place, and in the past few months, services have been cropping up to submit your website to 1000 and even 2000 social bookmarking websites.  These services are similar to all those directory submission services and the article submission services, and they are often offered by the same people.  On the surface of it, there is nothing wrong, but it does require a reaction from the search engines.

But first, a personal rant.  Submitting your home page to 2000 social bookmarking sites is NOT social bookmarking.  It is bookmarking, but it is NOT social.  If it was social, these services would be promoting your page on these sites, networking with other users, and you would end up with several links at any one social bookmarking site (assuming your content is actually interesting).

OK, that was more than just a personal rant.*  In fact, I’ll bet the search engines are noticing the same thing and looking at the same numbers and raising one of their search engine eyebrows right now.  If there are thousands of single-link entries at each social bookmarking website, most of which are essentially paid links, should those each be worth more than each entry that garnered, let’s say 12 Diggs or Zooms?  Those dozen votes clearly are exactly the type of recommendations the search engines look for in their algorithms.  Single links at social bookmarking websites clearly are not.  Each Digg or Zoom should be worth more than each single entry.  In fact, we might even go so far as to say that the more Diggs or Zooms, the more each one should be worth.

What should the search engines do?  Clearly, their algorithms must distinguish between sitewide links and links that appear numerous times independently on the same website.  This is true not just for social bookmarking sites, but also for forums where a resource might be cited in numerous threads over time.

Maybe Google and Yahoo and MSN already do this.  Maybe I’m not being that heretical after all.  Naw, that just would be too out-of-character.

* It qualifies as a rant because I capitalized the “NOT”.  Twice.