We’ve reported before on the confusing mixed messages Google is sending out regarding paid links. Their Webspam department headed by their own representative to the SEO/SEM/blogging community, Matt Cutts has repeatedly issued pronouncements against the evil (there’s that word again) practice of link selling. He even has a post about how to report paid links.
However, any cursory look at any given day at the main page of an extremely popular webmaster/affiliate marketing forum routinely shows adsense ads for link sellers. Okay, keep in mind the difference between people that submit your site to get free one way backlinks and actual brokers of links. What is the difference? Submitters just submit your link and there’s no guarantee that the directory sites, blog owners, or third party sites will accept your link. Actual brokers of links outright sell PAGERANK for cash. There’s even trading platform for blog owners selling links to advertisers. Google has swung it’s PAGERANK PENALTY HAMMER more than once. The most dramatic being its PR beatdown of bloggers for Izea/Payperpost. But apparently, its okay if similar link sellers advertise on Adwords?
Truly a WTF moment. Specially if you consider the fact that Google uses the same pay to link type of shenanigans when trying to compete in Japan. Just shows you how inconvenient business reality can sometimes get, right? Right… Are we still in “Don’t be evil” territory?
Definitely a confusing situation. Be careful of public networks that outright list your site with links to sell and your url appears in a database. It’s not that hard to join such networks and spider a database.
If you can, don’t sell links on your own sites at all. But if you can’t avoid it, definitely study the situation more closely. The stakes are quite high in this game… and getting higher.
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We’ll be publishing blogging resources from time to time. Here is the first installment of such resources. We hope you find them useful.
The Free Website Traffic Team
Link Extractor - Our Link Extractor will extract all the links from a web page you specify and list them.
Page Rank Explained - PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page.
How to back up and to restore Outlook Express data - This article describes how to back up and to restore the following items in Microsoft Outlook Express
How to profit from Free Reprint articles - hook the reader in and possibly profit from them.
SEO Tools - The SEO Tool webpage has collected the very best internet based SEO Tools available.
Casale Media - Looking to monetize your site?
Binary Encoder - If you ever need to encode stuff from prying eyes
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Keyword Luv is a nifty WP plugin that allows commenters to your DO FOLLOW blog to get a backlink to their site without cheesy looking comment names. Ethical linkbuilding campaigns CAN include DO FOLLOW blog commenting.
Problem: The normal way people get backlinks from comments is through their hyperlinked names. However, unless your name is the same as your site’s name, this naming convention looks cheesy. Example: Your name is Dave and your keywords are Comfy Chairs and your site is comfychairs.com Using the normal WP protocol, it would look like this Dave – Comfy Chairs. (note: we’re just using that domain as an example. We have no affiliation with that site).
Solution: Keyword Luv formats your name so it looks less cheesy when doing backlinks. The example above looks like Dave from Comfy Chairs Looks better, less spammy, more professional.
Thanks to Jesse from Admin Daily for this plugin recommendation.
You can download Keyword Luv from HERE
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Here’s some quick tips for WordPress bloggers:
Always remove the initial comment or default “about” message that comes with WordPress
I’ve seen quite a few tools that search the web specifically for these default text. These tools then either post comment spam or some other form of link spam.
If you’re using WordPress as a site page builder for SEO
Always remove any indication that your pages were generated by WP. You can always comment out items using the <! comment tag. You can also tweak your theme to make sure it doesn’t say it was generated by WP.
Set your blog feed settings to Excerpt
While there are many valid tools available online that use syndicated content for legitimate purposes, there are also others that just blindly ‘slurp’ your content and publish it elsewhere. No backlink. No attribution. Pure spam. Also, your content might get penalized for being duplicate content. Also, if they are using social media-driven blackhat methods, they even get to rank higher than you. Avoid all this drama by changing your feed settings.
Bottomline: WordPress is probably one of the most powerful online publishing tools you can use to both publish your content and get traffic from search engines. Optimize it well so it doesn’t help your competitors or spammers.
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