Link Building Blog, News and Articles - Textlinkbrokers.com/blog

Its always nice to get some news coverage.  Textlinkbrokers.com was mentioned in an article by Leslie Walker of The Washington Post.  The article was titled “How to Juice Up a Site’s Rank” and talks about the benefits of linking for SEO.

Unfortunatly you need to login (free account) to read the article.  Heres the link

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/26/AR2006042602441.html?sub=new

Heres some Excerps

....

One such firm is TextLinkBrokers.com, which started in Phoenix three years ago by brokering paid links between sites with high Google ranks to those with low Google ranks. But Google’s changing formulas have made it harder to boost a site’s ranking just through paid links, said Jarrod Hunt, chief executive of the 60-person firm.

“Editorial links are more valuable now than the paid ones,” he added.

Hunt said his firm still brokers text links for sale from thousands of independent Web sites, but it also develops original editorial content to help get links Google might consider to be of higher quality. Often the articles are given away or sold to sites in a program he calls “hosted marketing pages,” basically online advertorials with embedded links.

BTW, Quoting someone in your articles is a great way to encourage them to link to you, especially if they own an active blog.  People are always happy to link to articles that mention them.  Can anyone say LINK BAIT :)

Rand Fishkin over at SeoMoz.org posted an article on his blog yesterday that got me thinking about an article I was wanting to write a while back.....

He was having a little fun talking about some of the ways that Google could detect link networks in order to combat paid links. A topic that I’m sure most of the people reading our blog have thought about many times. The same subject that I, as a link builder, must consider on a daily basis.

While these sorts of hypotheticals are good to ponder at times and definitly worth considering when trying to stay ahead of the curve, I think most webmasters would also benefit from seeing things from another perspective.

Contemplating what Google is doing to COMBAT links is important but I think less time should be spent thinking about that and more time spent understanding that it really doesnt matter.  Its all relative....

Google will continue to raise the bar on linking standards, but how that bar affects your particular industry will always be relative to what your competition is doing.

You Dont Need Perfect Links, You Only Need Better Links Then Your Competitors

While Google will continually give lower quality links less weight and in some rare casis, no weight at all, it will not matter as long as you have better links then the other people in your industry.

In some industries something as simple as reciprocal links could be all you need to build in order to outdo your competittion.  While reciprocal links carry very little weight anymore in Google, they still carry some weight, and there are still some very non-competitive terms out there where a site could rank well with reciprocals alone especially if there are very little other websites targetting those industry terms.

In the case where you are in a competitive industry where companies are spending tens of thousands of dollars to build natural looking links through “More Advanced” linking methods reciprocals are obviously going to do very little for you.

Now I realize that some webmasters/companies want to do everything they possibly can to obtain the absolute best links possible, and in some cases they are justified.  If you have the resources and/or just want to be super prepared for any future algorithmic changes, then obtaining the absolute best links might be the right thing for you. 

So what sorts of links are better then others?  Well, that topic has been discussed a million times in other places, so I’ll leave that for another article.  For now, if you are not sure, I suggest you find a link building expert who can show you results from past clients.  Anyone can hypothisize about what they think Google is doing, but the real experts can show you examples of what has worked for their other clients.  Theories dont matter, results do.

I hope noone reading this post is under the impression that this article is at all attacking Rand.  His article was a great read, and he is an excellent link builder.  He is one of the few link builders out there that I give credit too, he definitly knows his stuff.  I have seen first hand the successful results of some of his link building efforts.

I recently had a client that was concerned that his link popularity was being leeched by his outgoing links.

In other words, he was concerned that sites he linked to were inheriting too much of his own link popularity.

In this article, I thought I’d explore this issue and provide some recommendations on how to handle your outbound linking strategy.

I often get asked this question.  It’s one which confounds many people.

We hear about how important it is to have as many quality inbound links as you can, however once you start gathering these links you find that many webmasters prefer or insist on reciprocal links.  So, the question then becomes should I do this?

In this article, I explore this issue and provide my recommendations.

By now you have probably heard that Google bought a new algorithm developed by a university student down under.

Many in the industry have speculated on what this could mean.  Will this transform Google yet again? Or, will it merely be just another piece of technology they buy but don’t appear to use.

In this article, I look at the implications of Orion and what it could mean to the future of search.

We recently received a question from a reader of our articles who wanted to know if there is a benefit to using subdomains as part of his URL structure.

He would then use 301 redirects found in his .htaccess file to point visitors at the subfolder on the same site.  The idea he had was that the subdomains are worth more to search engines and therefore the subdomain’s influence over the link popularity of the rest of the site would be positive. 

In this article I address this common question:

Are subdomains better than subfolders?

Hi Everyone

Just a quick note to let you know that Google’s online Calendar is live:

http://www.google.com/calendar/render

http://www.webmastereyes.com

There’s an interesting thread at SearcheEngineWatch in the forums that discusses internal pages having a higher PageRank than the home page.

And, while this is not impossible, there could be many reasons for it to happen.

In this article, I look at some of the reasons why the internal pages of a site can have a higher PR value than the home page.

There’s an interesting thread at SearcheEngineWatch in the forums that discusses internal pages having a higher PageRank than the home page.

And, while this is not impossible, there could be many reasons for it to happen.

In this article, I look at some of the reasons why the internal pages of a site can have a higher PR value than the home page.

On Tuesday, April 4th Google released a new feature called Google Related.

It’s an interesting feature that allows web owners to take a piece of JavaScript and insert it into their pages to provide their site users links to related information about the page they are on.

As with any new Google product, one has to decide if this is worth the effort or not.  In this article, I review this service and give you my opinion.

There has been a lot of talk lately about directory submissions and whether they are worth it or a waste of time.

While some directories may be a waste of time, I find there are directories that are worth the effort.

In this article, I give you some tips on choosing the right directories for submission.

I had an interesting meeting today with a potential client who was wondering why part of their site wasn’t performing as well as it should have been.

Additionally, they had a sub domain that was getting no traffic or rankings despite being online for over a year.

In this article, I show some of the mistakes they made so that you know what you can do to ensure that your site reaches its potential in the search engines.