However, getting your message across to a wide range of blogs is not always easy. You can write a lot of articles and submit them to article directories and maybe even through bulk guest writing services, but the results mean that your links are always going to the same few websites and it takes a lot of work to continually be producing the writing.

One easy way out of this is to use systems, such as BlogDistributor and PayPerPost to get the work done. With these you have access to a worldwide team of bloggers who will write about your subject and post it to their blog. Sounds great. What’s the downside?

Well cost is an issue, but if it improves the traffic flow of your website, then is it really an issue? However longevity of the links is not really known. Some bloggers will keep your links active forever, whilst others will remove them the moment they have been paid.

However, Google does not like to see this constant removal of links, so there is the risk of the blogger damaging their own blog’s ranking. By choosing a respectable blogger your links should last longer and do you a world of good!

                          

But it is fairly obvious that Google has given up on PageRank recently. There are better measures of a website’s popularity that it can now use (for example Analytics to watch what people actually do on that website). So, if Googe is moving away from PageRank, which is driven by links, and over to traffic and better measures of traffic, is link building dead?

Real traffic link building
For a start proper link building with respectable sites will drive traffic to your website when people click links. Guest blogging and article writing to high traffic websites are good examples. On this alone, link building is alive and well.

For search engine favour
Let’s face it, this is why the majority of people are interested in link building. Recently I have been running carefully targeted article writing campaigns on some of my blogs and on those that I have worked on the hardest, the search engine positions and the traffic has certainly increased. And in one case an aweful lot!

But it does seem that article writing in particular, which produces a lot of duplicate content, does seem to get a lot benefit from links as it appears that Google is using links to identify the source of the original content.

For now, PageRank might be dead, but link building is as strong, if not stronger, than ever.

                          

What’s so wrong about it? Well, it is just random spam for a start. But the email is inviting you to join their links directory (never a good thing anyway).

The email says that he has already added it, but please check it before it goes live. Nothing really wrong there I suppose, apart from a little confusing (is it submitted or not) and the spelling.

But the main thing is the directory structure. Having seem this spam a few times I looked at their directory and most of the “links” listed on the first page would not be visible to the search engines. So apart from being a links farm, the links are hidden anyway.

And what’s this about “reverse google pagerank algorithm”? Well it seems to be something that John Stahl has made up to make the email look good. I can’t find anyone else using that term.

Ultimately, I think it is meant as a clever way of him building links and selling his tool, so the email is nothing more than spam.

Hi,

Talk soon,
John Stahl

                          

But, being a customer asking the question I was obliged to look at the email and I was intrigued by the “reverse google pagerank algorithm”, which I had not heard of before.

I wasn’t really surprised when I searched for “reverse google pagerank algorithm” to discover that the first page of results all seemed to be a lot of other people agreeing that this email is a waste of time!

It seems that there is no algorithm, it is just a way of getting a little bit of extra interest in spam link building. They do not even tell you the PR of the site / webpage that they are offering to add your link to.

Hi,

Talk soon,
John Stahl

                          

Take this email that I have received today (click the picture to enlarge it). It is obviously driven from some spam crawler that reservationhotels.org are using to trawl through websites and pick up email addresses.

It then adds a link to the website, along with the title taken from the home page, to a links page. Wow, so I am on links page 3005. I don’t know why but I did actually look at this page (for once). It is full of junk!

Even on just this page there are 301 redirects, Japanese character websites, German aquarist, French baby, fertility, hairdressing opportunities and loads more totally unrelated websites. Further down the page is full of other websites that can’t be found, but the crawler has still added them to the page.

But, the owners of this PR3 website are quite safe in making these junk lists of what amount to Free For All directories. Why? Well looking at the site, there is nowhere that lists to any of these links pages, so search engines will never find them. Even if they do discover 1 links page that only links to the main site, not to any of the other junk pages.

So exchanging links with these guys would be a waste of time. You would get no benefit back. What though, if they did run their link exchanging honestly and gave a link back?

Well, this page and some other randomly guessed pages all display 20 links. So the traditional Google Page Rank algorithm (as first registered, we expect it has since changed), implies that this would donate to us ((PR * 0.85) / 20). In other words, 1 20th of 85% of that page’s page rank. And that is for on topic pages.

Ignoring the spammy nature of the page, that means that we would need about 24 links like this just to get the equivalent page rank for our site. Given that it is 1 of thousands of such pages, it is never likely to rise even to PR0, so that isn’t much good.

So how many would be needed to get to PR0? It is usually a factor of about 6 per level you jump up. So around 150 links off such links pages might provide a PR0, 900 links to get a PR1 and 5,500 to get a PR2.

But, in the words of the quiz show, we don’t want to give you that much! These are off topic links from an irrelevant site. The page is not a categorised directory, merely a random assortment of Free For All links. So that effect is watered down, by how much we do not know! It could be a whole PR penalty, meaning 5,500 such rubbish links give you a PR1, or even a PR0.

So don’t waste the time it takes me to hit the delete button. I don’t bother with these links. If you want links then use a proper method of earning them on pages that have a Page Rank and are accessible to search engines.

And as for the last paragraph of the email: “If your didn’t [sic] send mail to us with your site link where placed our link in 7 days,we will remove your link!” – please do so. I have no wish to be associated with such junk methods.

                          

What do I mean by this? Well, for pure Page Rank and SEO building, if you build hundreds (or thousands) of low quality links to your site, you risk the search engines noticing your efforts and banning you. So instead, point these links to an authority page that links to you.

I’ve seen this done to blog posts and article directories and there is no reason why Wiki or youtube could not be where you build the links to. As long as the page only contains external links that you control, there is a good chance that this works, with the following benefits:

1) No chance of search engines spotting what you are doing and punishing your site

2) Many minor links from general pages turn into 1 or 2 strong links from an authority page

3) Some believe that linking to an authority page is better for a page and carries more weight anyway

4) On such authority sites lots of little new links are totally natural and more tricky to detect

And with the way that Page Rank works, you should still get 85% of it if yours is the only external link, so well worth trying.

Leave a comment if you have any views.

                          

Well actually, removing the nofollow link from a blog comment is not as daft as it sounds. Yes, it is opening up to all kinds of spam, but that is why we must check these comments manually.

What are the advantages to not nofollowing?
The immediately obvious advantages are to the people that are leaving comments. Suddenly they get two benefits to leaving comments on related posts.

First, anyone else reading that post might read the comment and if they are interested, click on the link to go to their blog. This in itself is a great boost and I have seen traffic arriving on my websites through these links.

But secondly, because the nofollow is removed, there is also a tiny search engine benefit. If there are not too many comments per page and the page has any sort of Page Rank, then that is being shared amongst those commenting. As long as all spam comments are manually removed then the list of comments should represent just good, honest readers.

Yes, some of these are commenting just for the sake of the link, but as long as the comment passes the manual checks, this is fine with me. If they add to the conversation, tell me how they happened upon the post or whatever then there is some positive reason for their comment and I am happy to give them the benefit.

And this is where the benefit to the site owner comes in. By making the comments more valuable to site owners whilst being particular as to which are accepted, suddenly more people are coming over to the blog, reading the posts and then making useful comments.

See the big advantage? More readers! And where do these readers come from? Well there are plenty of lists of “dofollow” blogs to get included in. Once I have tidied this site a little, I’ll ask a few such as Nickoo to add me to their Do Follow List. Then people looking to place relevant comments will find the site.

The disadvantages.
As my mum would say, every silver lining has a cloud!

Yes, there are some disadvantages. Get well known and the amount of spam comments arriving on the blog could be huge. But that is why you have to be strict and delete (before they are published / approved) every spam comment. Leave only those in place that are suitable, add to the post and are useful.

Close comments on older posts to prevent too many spam bots getting hold of your site and make sure that Akismet is running to protect you from the worst of it all.

Is there a search engine risk?
Some people worry that having comments without nofollow will reduce your own Page Rank. I do not believe that to be true. Why?

Well in my research the formula for inheriting Page Rank always looks at external and internal pages separately. It counts the number of external sites linked per page and shares the Page Rank there and probably then does the same for internal pages.

Plus, if monitored and checked, then this is what search engines want to see. Conversations taking place on a topic. So why punish this?

Feel free to browse the site and leave a suitable comment on any post and if you also believe in nofollowing, let me know so I can visit your site!

                          

The problem is that it is not always clear from a page rank, or a count of incoming links, only how popular a weblog is. Even a low ranking website might have thousands of unique daily traffic, whereas merely because a website has a huge page rank does not guarantee any visitors per day.

So, if you could, looking at the traffic stats is a wonderful starting point to picking where to place your adverts. But, this only works if the sites that you are advertising on are highly relevant to your theme and can send you some of their traffic.

But plenty of advertisers are more interested in the search engine benefits of buying links. Rightly or wrongly, this is the case. So, what are the best links?

Well once more, links from a relevant page on a website are always much better than links from a completely different theme of page. The major search engines are thought to differentiate between links that are on relevant pages and links that are from a random page. But even links from off topic pages could work, just not as well.

Then, of course, a link from a page of, as for instance, a page rank 4 page are more beneficial than from a lower page rank page. But how much so? Well, as a rule the consensus is that a link on a page is worth around 3 – 5 times the value (in search ranking terms) of a link on a page of 1 rank below it. So, if you buy 4 links on a PR3 page, you have roughly the same search engine benefits as 1 link on a PR4 page.

But, what does that mean if you are paying bloggers to post round you? Well, roughly speaking, you would expect a well ranking site to result in your advert being placed on a post with some sort of page rank, whilst one without a rank is practically absolutely not going to have a ranking on the post pages.

We’ll also look at typical costs. For a 100 word advert on a PR0 weblog, you may be look at paying the blogger round $1.50. For a PR1 weblog the fee might be $2.50 and for PR2 $5. OK, the home page’s Page Rank does not always correlate to the post page’s rank, but you could see that at these levels, for paying about twice the price, you are actually getting 3 – 5 times the value.

So surprisingly, paying more for less links can be better. Of course, buy stacks of links and you may be lucky and get in early on a blog that will in future become a very well ranked website. An admirable low host high value link, but not guaranteed.

So, for the best value links, look for blogs that might place themed posts that have a good page rank. They might price more, but the value you get back should be even better.

                          

A big step, but instead of preventing the abuse of the comments system by nofollowing links, I will be monitoring carefully every comment to every post on the website and either removing or nofollowing those that are obviously an attempt at abusing the comments.

So, all genuine looking comments will now be followed by the search engines! I’m expecting this to take a bit of work, but if successful it should be useful. But, the nofollow is remaining on links within the comment text! Only 1 link per comment, please!

Hopefully I will be able to leave this change in place indefinitely and roll it out to my other blogs, if I see benefits to this system rather than just thousands of spam comments!

Do you already remove the nofollow from comment avatars? If so, what hints and tips do you have to share? If your blog does not nofollow comments leave a mention below and I might just pop over and have a good browse of it myself. If a few people respond, I might even be tempted to make a list!

p.s. want to find more sites that don’t nofollow comments? Take a look at this page.

                          

I had assumed that, like search engines, Technorati would just find my blogs, index them and do its thing. The same was as Google Page Rank and the Alexa Rank just automatically happen.

But thinking about it, this was stupid! Technorati just deals in blogs, not sites. Now Google is supposed to be able to favour blogs, so at first instance it was reasonable to expect Technorati to also spot them. But no, that would require Technorati to spider every site to find just the ones that it is after.

Also, Technorati requires your RSS feed to grab the latest posts. It does not just automatically allocate you a rank – it needs the blog owner to first tell the system that the website is actually a blog then it will start amounting data and then doing its stuff.

This blog has now been accepted on Technorati as a blog, so hopefully over the next week or so I’ll see the Authority level of the blog creep away from 1. Then I can start investigating what else is needed to get a decent Technorati Authority ranking!

                          

We are an expert link building firm which provides outsourcing services to a wide variety of agencies and clients globally.

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It sounds a good offer. Links from $5 a time from ‘maximum link juice‘ sites. But to me, it can not be all that it is made out to be. The cost of $5 per link is too cheap. Even a trial pack is offered of 8 links for $50. I can only assume they hope people buy that trial pack.

Why do I think it is so cheap? Well I often receive offers from people to include on my own websites links to their clients, in return for a payment. Exactly what the above is offering. But, for links on a basic PR2 / PR3 website, I can be offered £150 – 200 per link, if it is a whole page or a paragraph on the home page. Even just writing a page on a blog and linking once to a company earned me £30 per link earlier this week.

And I would not exactly call my pages ‘maximum link juice‘ pages. OK, there are not any ‘no follow’ tags etc. But they are not pages with huge page ranks. So if I can get £30 for a basic link off a blog, with the company sourcing the links also taking a fee, that must be costing the buying company far more than £50 per link. So what exactly does $5 get you a link from? I won’t be finding out. But thanks for the offer.

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