Online Auctions

So, you are thinking about that email request. The one you got last week about giving someone a reciprocal link. You don’t know this person from adam, but there you are trying to make the best decision for your own website.

Many of us seo professionals will know what this term means, but for the rest it simply means getting links from other sites to your own.

When this whole thing started, this was done by asking friends and foes to link to you, and this was acceptable for a while but Yahoo Google and MSN soon began to devalue these reciprocal efforts because too many of the reciprocal links were contrived and not natural.

Spam is known to many of us as that tasty meat from which the current swine flu propagates,lol, sorry couldn’t help myself, but in internet lingo its also known as the email that floods your inbox and makes it difficult to find your real mail.

As an example, some marketers send out unsolicited commercial spam email to millions of unsuspecting users. Others created fake websites and pages with links back to their own – not the phrase “their own” – commercial products – hence the need for objective PageRank and PageTrust. At that time, the search engines were not looking at the following things such as which reciprocal links were owned by the same person or which 5 linking websites were sharing the same IP Address. In order to stop those who would fill our inboxes with junk, this information is deemed to be rather important for determining exactly who the spammers are.

Perhaps one of the most important parts of the backlinking process is in what keywords one uses – traditionally, this has been where most linking efforts have failed.

Why? We can’t specifically tell others to use such and such an anchor text in their link to us.

Secondly, since as a casual reader, you are not likely to be an expert on long tail keywords, you are going to most logically try to pick the keywords having the most traffic. One could however be forgiven for this as it really is a most logical mistake. A brand new online venture, even after being indexed by Google or most search engines, typically has no chance at ranking on its chosen keywords for many months if not years.

Ergo, have we looked at a potentially time wasting effort here?

The potential problems don’t stop there. The page rank of new articles is N/A or after indexing, typically Zero where 0 is worst and 10 is the best. Although some may argue this while a new page with N/A or O as its rank will have a freshness quotient that can help it positively, in most search engines, this zero which is evidence of lack of backlinks will assuredly not work in its favor.

But there are exceptions to every rule and if the newly created page is sitting on a highly popular web2.0 social network property like squidoo or craigslist, bebo or scribd to name a few then it won’t be penalized as much just because its current pagerank or credibility level appears to be a zero.

As the examples of exceptions above clearly show, it is thought that new pages on foundation sites such as those with a PageTrust of 5 or above, inherently acquire some of the PageRank or PageTrust of the site that they sit on.

Technical babble – the question really is – So, what’s a girl to do?

Google’s time worn advice, go back to fundamentals, content and be innovative. They would recommend strongly that you even create “link-bait” that will cause others to want to link to you.Which I also recommend if you have any idea what this link-bait thing means. Its never a great idea to truly ignore what Google recommends, however I urge you to examine the issue more deeply. Calculate whether you really have 3-6 months that it takes to consistently create new articles almost daily, and to put out such a ferocious amount of intensely likable content in one spot that would cause people to socially bookmark that page on your site – If the answer is no then you understand why most of us will never ever intentionally create link-bait.

There has to be ways around this. What should one do?

Tags: Marketing