By Vik Tailor

Lately, there have been a lot of heated discussions regarding link building. Is it ethical to create a link building campaign? Does Google or any other search engine penalize for “link farms” (a bunch of non-related links created for the SOLE purpose of increasing search engine ratings)? Is the “link building era” over?

Link Farms

Many webmasters claim that Google penalizes websites for link farms. If this is so, why are a link farm sites that have a page rank of 5 on their link farm page? Let me give you an example, go to Google.com, type in any popular keyword(s) and append the word “links” to it. For example, “ABCD Links.” Notice you’ll get tones of websites that are linking to unrelated sites, but still have a great PR. I do not encourage link farming in any way or form, but building valuable partnerships is something I do encourage. If you’re a jewelry site and you’re exchanging links with an antiques site, I think this is a great thing. It’s very possible that someone searching for jewelry may have an interest in antiques. I own a few sites and the hits I receive from partially related sites are phenomenal. Most of my websites are targeted towards webmasters so I receive hits from all sorts of sites. Remember, many webmasters claim to know the truth regarding search engine algorithms, but no one knows the EXACT TRUTH except the programmers at the search engines. Webmasters may have been penalized in the past for link farms and doorway pages (pages created around certain keywords for the sole purpose of redirecting surfers to the main page), but who’s to say why some HAVEN’T been penalized.

Who Should I Create Link Partnerships With?

1. Create link partnerships with sites related to your site.

2. Create link partnerships with sites that have an audience that may be interested in your products

3. Exchange homepage links with websites that fit in your genre. You’ll receive a link on a page with a good ranking and you’ll get quality, targeted hits.

How Do You Find Link Partners?

1. Signup with an automated links management provider that organizes your links and helps find link partners. Automated tools are the best because they help you save time. Uploading and downloading your pages for every link exchange can be a huge pain and very time consuming. Automated tools are NOT link farms because they give you complete control of who you exchange links with. If a member exchanges links with every website, he/she might be abusing the tool. If a member uses the tool responsibly, it can be very effective.

2. This is a great little exercise I would recommend to anyone.

a. Write down 20 search terms pertaining to your website

b. Go to http://www.google.com and type in a search term written in step A

c. Contact as many websites as possible listed under that search term and ask them to exchange inner page or homepage links with you. If they’re NOT interested, ask whether they would be interested in selling advertising space. If your website is fairly new, you may want to ask sites for advertising prices. Free hits are the best hits but sometimes you might have to go the extra lap and pay for service. I wouldn’t recommend spending over $100 / month for advertising UNLESS it’s a high traffic site with your site audience. The best deals are the ones that offer $10-25 / month. There are sites out there that will sell SUPER cheap advertising, and others that charge an arm and a leg.

EVERYONE gets rejected sometime or another so keep your head up and keep moving along! The internet is comprised of Billions of websites. If you’re rejected 500 times, you still have MANY business opportunities left! This is a continuous job so set aside time every week to do this. If you don’t have time for this, then you don’t have time to make money.

3. Hire a link building firm (this can be quite expensive but if you have money, its minimal work for you)

PageRank

Pagerank is a great tool but don’t use it as your ONLY measurement for success. I can’t explain everything about pagerank but a good explanation is given at http://www.google-watch.org/pagerank.html.

Conclusion

In conclusion, link building is not only for increasing link partners and search engine rankings, it’s also used to create partnerships and establish profitable relationships with other webmasters. Link building is a tedious process, but one of the best for getting free (sometimes not), targeted hits from other websites.

Vik Tailor is the owner of http://www.linkexchanged.com and http://www.buyadvertisingonline.com. He has been in the online advertising industry for over 4-5 years and has extensive online marketing knowledge.

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There are a growing list of things that I already hate about WordPress 2.7.  Most of them are minor issues that can either be ignored or simply written off as quirks I don’t really need to worry about for my style of blogging.  The major issue is still the layout.

Wordpress 2.7 Write Screen. Click to open full size in new frame or window.

This is not some minor petty concern. This is flat out bad design.  Any blogger worthy of the name is using some plugins and other tools on the administration side of the blog.  This is as it should be, since customization has always been a prime feature of WordPress.  I sincerely hope someone soon comes up with an administration plugin to fix the layout flaws.

Here is the major problem with WordPress 2.7.  As you will notice in the full screen image all of the internal links for WordPress 2.7 have moved to the left hand side of the screen.  in western languages we read from left to right meaning the most important or most often used information should always be put at the top left of our viewing area.  Links to the dashboard and everything else on the administration side of things clutters your field of view while posting.  There is a good chance I will be using ScribeFire even more than I have previously, because of this layout flaw.

Getting to post through scribefire doesn’t make the problems all better with a soft kiss from the open source faeries.  Writing a proper post in requires more than you typing in a few lines of text putting in a picture and calling it good.  There are all sorts of things you need your write window for, that scribefire can’t do.  Second problem with having the internal linking on the far left of the screen is the scroll bars for most of us are on the far right of the screen.  This means mousing clear across the screen to get to the links and then mousing back to scroll down the new screen.  This is not only inefficient, it is ergonomically unsound.  it wouldn’t surprise me if this layout doesn’t cause some serious problems for people who already have hand and wrist problems.

While the layout of administration links sucks, I am not totally displeased with other things about Wordpress 2.7.  The write page is back to making good use of available space.  My categories by default are just to the right of the post box.  On top of that the components are modular and can be moved around the page.  This is great design, and a great feature for those of us who use certain things far more than others.

In the end you will either love this design, or you will hate it.  Either way though if you are serious about your blogging then WordPress is still your best option and WordPress 2.7 will be the platform they keep the security fixes up to date on, so you will use it.