well I’m back from SES New York.. and as the parties still rage on, I had time to think about Text link Ads.

I still see some sites ranking really well by just buying links via Text Link Ads, but more and more I’m seeing death and destruction, while confusion remains supreme and equality seems so far away what do you do?

In New York, for the first time I publicly said that “Buying Links just isn’t worth the risk”, in fact I even went as far to say it’s becoming the new blog spam in the internet world..

Buy expired domain with some Pagerank ( helps when buying links )
Buy 20 - 40 pages or so of quality content, around or near to the target subject.
Buy links, then 301 or cloak 301 to your spam site.

or

Just buy links for your competitor but don’t report them, just report the sites that are selling the Links, so that you keep your industry out of the Loop.

there are so many ways that buying link or selling links can get you busted, but here is the big thing EQUALITY you just don’t now who will take the bullet, from my experience it’s hit and miss..

Take link sellers like :
www.9rules.com

www.nwsource.com

www.infoplease.com

www.phpclasses.org

www.howstuffworks.com

They all seem to be holding their traffic, well most do

you might think I’m outing these guys, well that happened quite a few weeks ago when I had to do a site re-inclusion request, and yes if you have bought links or have bad links going to your site you better be able to prove what was bought and what was not and include them all in the reinclusion report. The difficult thing was that it was links that had been bought months before I was hired so even harder to trace back.

What was odd in my eyes was why didn’t these sites get the same treatment the client did .. he didn’t even rank for his own name ! We were lucky that we could find out what had happened and could fix it, with the help of Google and a lengthy report the site came back, but I see other industries that are still buying links and dominating the top slots.. so do we want to even up the playing field? Do we all log into our Google Webmaster consoles and start reporting. Buying links has never been so cheap and never been so risky…

DaveN

what’s the going rate at the moment and how do you measure the success rate, I mean Social Media it’s so easy to game and yet again it’s so easy to mess up.

Is Social Media easy to measure, recently I had a client that had over a million extra visitors due to a social media campaign that cost us 50,000usd in fairness the client was happy with the traffic, but I wanted to know a little more, after all I get bonus on profit, so once the cost of the consultancy, production and implementation we are done 15K, and know after the campaign has ended we have 5 more back links, and sales have gone back to pretty much what they where before we started the whole social media game…

client still happy and thinks it was still a worth while punt, but won’t be doing it again anytime soon.

DaveN

Creating a successful link building campaign really isn’t that easy. Looking through links to other sites and seeing what’s hot and what’s not. Link building takes time if its done effectively.

It’s often difficult explaining to clients that batches of links cannot just be thrown into their sites here and there. OK, links build authority but the implementation has to be timely and well thought out.

One of the most notable patterns seen when looking at links is just how many highly ranked sites opt for the same linking partners. Is this not a dilution of the net itself ? Yes, it gives the sites the authority they need but at the same time focuses on a relatively small section of the web.

Link popularity increases traffic but should also add resource to the website.

this shit and this shit and this shitand this shit

Just wondering….

DaveN

added looks like someone is shutting down scaping me

from what I can see in last nights Vista update, Microsoft added Sliverlight has an optional update. so all but one machine in the office has silverlight on it, most people just ticked the box and installed it…

I know I shouldn’t be all happy but I have wanted to see silverlight on all vista machine for a long long time.

and we also got Office 2007 service pack at 200meg hehe, so if you are wondering why the internet is going slow today :)

DaveN

Oh dear, Wikipedia Jimmy Wales is in trouble following the allegation that he has been editing pages on the encyclopedia in exchange for ££££.

So far Jimmy is denying allegations. How much are you willing to pay to get a Wiki edited ? ;)

Read the full story on the bbc website:

Well a Adsense block I hadn’t seen before with 2 up / down selectors

flash here

Wordpress playing up at the moment :)

DaveN

Have seen several cases now where using “nofollow” on internal links did this

a) Increased ranking on short tail and killed a lot of long tail traffic .. Hmmm not good
b) Didn’t effect ranking’s at all .. Ok so my internal page rank may have lifted a little here
c) Decreased rankings in general .. NOT COOL !
d) Slightly increased traffic over all. Way COOL !

Now the big issue for me is there are a few people that are starting to say this is the silver bullet for SEO, but what I don’t want to say is this is bullshit, there are too many other factors why you could have moved in the serps, the big clean up in the paid links could have and a side effect on your rankings or your competitors…

so the 6 million dollar question, does NOFOLLOWING your internals effect your Ranking in google, I say ranking and not Pagerank. Not even I’m going to say that No-Following all but 3 pages from your homepage won’t increase you pagerank on those internals, But I have seen some ODD STUFF happen so i decided the only real way to do this was

a) set up controlled tests. I so love doing that, but what happens if the test is influenced by external factors like say

howstuffworks.com links to sitea.com which links to me, then howstuffwork.com gets hit with a link selling penalty which in turn effects the link juice from sitea.com to me and I drop a little in the ranking… thats the way this link stuff works you know.

b) just ask Matt Cutts so I did.

Matt’s answer was :

Nofollowing your internals can affect your ranking in Google, but it’s a 2nd order effect.

My analogy is: suppose you’ve got $100. Would you rather work on getting $300, or would you spend your time planning how to spend your $100 more wisely.

Spending the $100 more wisely is a matter of good site architecture (and nofollowing/sculpting PageRank if you want). But most people would benefit more from looking at how to get to the $300 level.

_____________________________

sheesh a simple YES would have been ok, But I’m totally in agreeance with Matt here. Me I worry about getting to the next level of Pagerank and not loosing what little I have … so link to me.. joke i tend to house keep my site every so often to decide how many pages my site should have indexed, 301 the old crappy stuff in fact I’m hoping to do that before SES New York, i will tell you how that worked out.

DaveN

Addef this is a great article by joost on
PageRank sculpting - Siloing and more

Is it still the same that if you mention

death, dead, deceased, demise, die, dying
expire, fatal stroke, past away, perished

or drug related terms like

cocaine, drugs, heroin, marjuana, medication, morphine, overdose

you can get you adsense Accounts Banned

DaveN

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1 ) be a fireman or train driver or policeman or work with computers ( yer ever since My DAD bought me a TRS-80 ) : Done

2 ) Get Married and have Kids : ( I have wanted to be a father since I was 18 ) : Done

3 ) See Leeds United play at Wembley ( I saw Leeds beat Liverpool 4-3 Eric Cantona scored a hat-trick in the 1992 Charity Shield ) : Done

4 ) See England in the World Cup finals ( thanks to Tim Mayer and Danny Sullivan, I saw England knocked out by Portugal ) : Done

5 ) Own a Sports Car ( I have had BMW 330 Sports, Calibra Turbo, too Old for a two seater :) ) Done

6 ) Meet a Billionaire ( Met Larry and Sergey at Google, Thanks Matt) : Done

7 ) VW Camper .. yes it’s still on the list !

8 ) Have sex with Twins … ( never gonna happen, think it was every boy’s dream at my school )

9) Win a Million … Don’t play the Lottery so not sure how to do this

10) Go on a Naturist Holiday .. yer baby swim in the sea nude

what’s the one thing you would still love to DO

DaveN