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SEO One-way Web Links
I've only seen five strategies that really work
consistently for getting hundreds of links.
Less Effective One-Way Link Strategies
Yet there's perennial interest in alternative linking
strategies. They range from bad to OK, but none offer as
much potential as the five major ways of getting links.
Link farms never seem to die. The latest variations try to
pass themselves off as viral marketing, but are really a
sort of endless pyramid scheme: you link to me, so I link
to someone else, who links to someone else, and on and on
down the line. Link farms can get you delisted from search
engine indexes, so don't even try them.
Affiliates can provide you with one-way inbound links if
you use affiliate software that links directly to your
site rather than through a redirect. But many, many
affiliates are now placing all their affiliate links in
redirects of their own invention, to help protect their
commissions from pirates who will simply apply to the
program themselves to get a discount.
Posting to web forums and blogs regularly will get you
one-way inbound links, but they'll only have search-engine
value a small percentage of the time. Many blogs and
bulletin boards use search-engine-unfriendly dynamic file
formats, automatically encase links in script, or use
robot instructions to prevent spiders from following
links.
Many one-way inbound
linking strategies fall into the
great-if-you-are-lucky-enough-to-get-it category, such as
winning a web award or being featured on a high-PageRank
website just for being so great.
Other one-way incoming link strategies are in the
this-will-take-forever-to-get-anywhere category, such as
offering to provide testimonials to all your vendors in
exchange for a link to your site. (Hint: If you can get
more than twenty links that way, you probably need to
simplify your supply chain.)
Now, on to the five major ways of getting large numbers of
one-way inbound links. Some are better than others, but
they all have more potential than some of the more mad
capped strategies. Of course, none is a good strategy all
on its own. You have to understand all five strategies in
order to really gain a distinct advantage in the one-way
link hunt.
1. Waiting for Inbound Links
If you have good content you will eventually get one-way
inbound links naturally, without asking. Organic, freely
given links are an essential part of any SEO
strategy. But you cannot rely on them, for two
reasons:
Unfortunately, "eventually" can be a very long
time.
Worse, there is a vicious cycle: you can't get search
engine traffic, or other non-paid traffic, without inbound
links; yet without inbound links or search engine traffic,
how is anyone going to find you to give you inbound links?
2. Triangulating for Inbound Links
Search engines will have a tough time dampening reciprocal
links if the reciprocation is not direct. To get links to
one website you offer in exchange a link from another
website you also control. This would seem to be a mostly
foolproof way of defeating the link-dampening ambitions of
Google and the rest. If you have more than one website,
you probably are already employing this linking method.
There are only a few drawbacks:
You need to have more than one website in the same general
category of interest or the links won't be relevant.
The work required to set up this kind of arrangement and
verify compliance is not insignificant. The process cannot
be automated to the same extent as direct one-to-one
reciprocal linking.
As with traditional reciprocal links, a very big drawback
is that the links are mostly on "Resources"
pages that are just lists of links. There's only a small
chance of getting significant traffic from these links.
Plus, any "Resource" page may well eventually
become an easy target for link dampening, if that hasn't
happened already.
3. Submitting to Directories
They are the legendary fairy lands of SEO: PageRank-passing,
no-fee-charging, and actually well-run directories of
relevant links. Yes, they really do exist. An SEO
acquaintance tells me he knows 200 good ones just off the
top of his head. Plus, there are other kinds of
directories: directories of affiliate programs, of
websites using a certain content management system, of
websites whose owners are members of this or that group,
of websites accepting PayPal, etc. etc.
Ah, a link in a PageRank-passing link directory: it's a
good deal if you can get it. But let's say you do get
links from all 200 such directories and a hundred more
from the little niche directories--now what?
4. Paying for Inbound Links
Buying and selling text links on high-PageRank web pages
has become big business. Buying good traffic-generating
"clean" links is a great alternative to
pay-per-click advertising, which confers no SEO benefit.
But, there are a number of pitfalls of relying primarily
on paid links for SEO:
The cost of the hundreds of links required for substantial
search engine traffic can become prohibitive.
As soon as you stop paying, you lose your link--you are
essentially renting rather than owning, with no "link
equity" building up.
Google is actively trying to dampen the impact of paid
links on rankings, as revealed in various patent filings.
A website can try to mask the fact that the links are
paid, but how well it does that is out of your control.
Given Google's mission to dampen paid links'
effectiveness, paid link buyers have an interest in
verifying that a potential paid link partner is
"passing PageRank." But identifying appropriate
PageRank-passing paid link partners is quite a task in
itself.
Google also has a stated mission of dampening the value of
any "artificial" links. Having most of your
links on PageRank 3 or higher web pages would seem to be a
dead give-away that your links are "artificial,"
since the vast majority of web pages (note: not
necessarily websites, but their pages) are PageRank 1 or
lower. Meanwhile, buying PageRank 0 or 1 links would have
so little impact on a site's PageRank that it would not be
worth the expense.
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