Dear Yahoo! Directory Submit Client,

You are receiving this message because your site has been listed in the Yahoo! Directory under the Regional/Countries/United Kingdom or the Regional/Countries/Ireland category path. Because of this, your site has also been appearing in the U.K. & Ireland Directory. (http://uk.dir.yahoo.com/)

We are notifying you that the Yahoo! U.K. & Ireland Directory will be shutting down on November 18, 2010, and your site’s listing in that directory will be eliminated. Your site listing in the U.S.-based Directory (http://dir.yahoo.com) will remain unchanged.

…

We understand that appearing in the Yahoo! UK & Ireland Directory may have been important to some of our U.K.-based customers. Because of this impending shutdown, as a courtesy, we are offering you the following options for your listing.

1) You may continue to maintain your listing through the Yahoo! Directory Submit program. Your site will remain listed in the Directory as it is now and the applicable annual fee will apply on your anniversary date. No further action on your behalf would be required.
2) You may request a refund of the most recent fee you paid as part of the Directory Submit program. Your Directory Submit account would be terminated immediately, and your site will then be removed from the Yahoo! Directory. If you wish to proceed with this option, please email cc-directory-submit-billing-e2y@yahoo-inc.com with the Order ID, your YahooID, and the URL of your listing. In order to take advantage of this refund, Yahoo! must receive a fully completed request no later than 5 p.m. PDT on November 18, 2010. Otherwise, Yahoo! will conclude that you have selected the first option.

I really cannot understand this stance – they are keeping the international directory running, so it would take no extra work to keep the UK version running, and continue to collect $300/year payments from everyone listing.

If you are listed in the UK directory and choose to keep your listing, you will still be linked to from the international version, so it is still worth maintaining it, in my opinion.

Outside of the Best Of The Web directory, there really isn’t many UK specific directories worth paying to list in today. If you still think any are value for money, feel free to drop a link in the comments

I am writing this post about the current state of DMOZ, or “the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web” as they proclaim themselves to be. I believe time and technology has simply passed DMOZ by – its time to put it out to pasture, or drastically change the way in which it operates.

Outside of links for search engine spiders, the directory currently has zero use.  If you want to hire a painter in your home town, would you go look up a dmoz category? Or would you use Google? By their own admission dmoz is horrendously out of date, so how can they possibly expect human users to gain any value from it?

One potential dmoz listing has been complaining he’s waited 10 years and is still not listed.  Jimnoble (dmoz editor) says himself:

Visit the category where you believe your website should be listed and use the suggest URL link at the top of the page. Some volunteer will process your listing suggestion in time but we can’t predict who or when that might be. Elapsed times can range from a few days to a few years. There is no need to re-suggest your website and doing so could be counter-productive because a later suggestion overwrites any earlier one.

Pretty much an admission right there that the directory is a complete failure. How can they be of use to human users when great new sites can potentially take several years to get in, but can be in search engine results and showing in search queries within a day of launching?

As well as being a miserable failure when it comes to end users, the DMOZ staff also seem to want to create as poor a user experience as possible for people submitting websites too.

This quote from Mauri (who is a moderator on the forum) sums it up well:

No, because all submitters can easily know when their sites get listed, since they will appear on the public side of the directory.

If a site gets rejected, and this happens because our Guidelines say that’s not listable,
there is no valid or useful reason to inform the submitter of that decision.

The following reply by Cardchoices is perfectly correct:

Yes there is a useful reason for this. Lots of people out there will keep resubmitting their sites because they thought their sites had been turned down eventhough their sites have not yet been reviewed. Sequently, it’s a waste of time for both submitters and editors

Everything is already in place to send people an automated email saying they have been reviewed and rejected. What is there to gain (apart from lots of unwanted resubmissions) by making people wait and see?

With the current state of the DMOZ directory, pulling the plug on it and letting it die out might be the best thing for everyone concerned.

You can tell that the directory is a mess when a war veteran selling childs toys can’t get in after 6 months,  yet there is a Domain brokerage company listed who are running front page ads on their site… selling dmoz listed domains that have been dropped and caught!

From the dmoz about page:

The web continues to grow at staggering rates. Automated search engines are increasingly unable to turn up useful results to search queries. The small paid editorial staffs at commercial directory sites can’t keep up with submissions, and the quality and comprehensiveness of their directories has suffered. Link rot is setting in and they can’t keep pace with the growth of the Internet.

This is simply not true – Best of the Web are a paid directory and are doing a far better job of keeping up with things than dmoz could ever hope to do.

These citizens can each organize a small portion of the web and present it back to the rest of the population, culling out the bad and useless and keeping only the best content.

I don’t even know where to start on the quote above, its wrong in so many different ways.

The Open Directory follows in the footsteps of some of the most important editor/contributor projects of the 20th century. Just as the Oxford English Dictionary became the definitive word on words through the efforts of volunteers, the Open Directory follows in its footsteps to become the definitive catalog of the Web.

Google is the only definitive catalog of the web in 2010. The only catalog dmoz is like is the 3 year old mail order catalog I’m currently propping up my old desk with – its about as out of date as it…

Given that the directory is useless for humans, the only possible reason to be an unpaid editor would be to either list your own sites, sabotage competitors, sell listings, or all of the above. With a pagerank 8 homepage and 7 million links pointing to it, its easy to see why listings are in demand from an seo perspective.  Heres a screen shot of 5 listings I sold today to one buyer (click it to see the full size):

I know from speaking to friends who have managed to get into more lucrative pages to edit than me that some links have been bought and sold for significantly more than I have charged.

The thing is, all is not completely lost with DMOZ if the owners were willing to turn it around. It would only take one small change – charging a fee to have your website reviewed like Yahoo Dir and BOTW do.

DMOZ admin made the following comment:

Charging a fee and passing that on to volunteers would invite abuse (and given how the volunteer system is structured would be difficult to manage). And with payment, much of the value the directory has would be lost.

This is complete bullshit, as right now there is a massive incentive for abuse. From an editors point of view, there is no reason whatsoever to stay aboard this sinking ship for any reason outside of taking bribes – corruption is rampant across the full directory with the current business model.

If the payments to review your site went via official channels, this would wipe out 99% of the corruption overnight.  If you were paying for a review that was guaranteed to be done within a week then the system would work perfectly. Right now if you submit a site, you don’t know if you just got a lazy editor, one who owns a competing site to you and will never give you the juicy link, a category owned by one of the many “pay to play” editors. Since you could potentially wait months/years there really isn’t any way to tell.

Nobody is going to pay for a link twice, so by charging officially it would completely kill the thriving black market for dmoz links. By guaranteeing a 3 or 7 day review, it would become obvious if someone wasn’t listing sites that they should be, and those editors could quickly be weeded out.

I cannot accept the argument of  “And with payment, much of the value the directory has would be lost”. I would say the value has already been lost since high quality sites cannot get in the directory due to corruption, lazyness and the fact that the small number of editors who are honest are massively over worked.

Look at how much business BOTW, Business.com and the Yahoo Directory are doing and tell me how that wouldn’t work perfectly with this dying behemoth of a directory…

• Aaron Wall of SEO Book and Clientside SEM
• Dave Snyder, Managing Partner of the Blueglass Agency
• Debra Mastaler of Alliance Link and the The Link Spiel
• Eric Ward, Ericward.com Linking Strategies and Chief Link Evangelist at advertising intelligence firm AdGooroo.com
• Jim Boykin of We Build Pages
• Justilien Gaspard, Link Columnist for SEW and owner of Justilien.com
• Michael Gray of the Graywolf SEO blog
• Rae Hoffman, aka Sugarrae, CEO of MFE Interactive and Outspoken Media
• Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz
• Roger Montti, the founder and owner of martinibuster.com
• Todd Malicoat, aka Stuntdubl, SEO faculty at MarketMotive.com

Keeping with prior format, this interview is very unique in my eyes as opposed to other interviews for two main reasons. The first being that the questions submitted are actually submitted by the interviewees (one each) so you’re not only getting answers from some of the best, but on topics that other advanced link builders want to hear about.

The second is that no one gets to see the answers of anyone else before the interview is published (I answer mine before sending them out to the interview panel). As I’ve said before, this isn’t about a single answer followed by ten head nods. Any agreements come from true beliefs and any contrary opinions come from the same. We’re all good at what we do, but it doesn’t mean we always agree or that any single one of us is the “be all, end all” on developing backlinks.

You can read the interview here.

This was the message they were sending out:

The ultimate Groupola summer special: £99 instead of £499 for a sim-free iPhone4 handset

To secure an iPhone 4 for you click on this link on the 2 July
REMEMBER This link will only activate on the 2 July 2010 at 9.30am.
The offer is subject to stock availability and is likely to go very fast. Make sure you are one of the first people to visit Groupola.com this Friday.

With iPhone4′s constantly sold out, and in massive demand, there is simply no group discount to be had. Any website running an offer like this is swallowing a £400 loss on each phone. Groupola have refused to answer questions on how many phones they actually had for sale, so how much it cost them to run this publicity stunt is unknown.

The only way you could get the link to visit when the phones went on sale was to subscribe to their email list. I am assuming this would have generated a massive amount of email signups.

When the deal opened this morning, their website immediately crashed. You are going to need an extremely good server setup to send an email to hundreds of thousands of people at one time, basically telling them “Visit this link RIGHT NOW or you will miss out on getting the hottest phone ever for 20% of its real value” and be able to keep the site live.

The bad feedback has already started. There are hundreds of negative comments on the official Facebook page of Groupola:

Ammarah Ahmad Honestly Groupola.
I’ve been trying since 9.29am.
And as with everyone else, still no luck.
How about you ensure that this deal is actually available instead of advertising your fake ass scams?

Tom Philpotts @Groupola you should have made sure that your servers were able to cope. That was a massive error on your part, now you have many unhappy people who will not use your site. I think just by giving the people the chance that would have been satisfied with that.

Eddie Milner https://secure.consumerdirect.gov.uk/reportascam.aspx

Charlie ‘Dave’ Stevens I can’t complain to consumer direct, as the groupola website won’t load to get their address

Pasquale Biscardi shame on you ! still not saying how many iphones they had…. they need more time to make it up……

Debbie Miller So now they claim they have sold out. yeah right. never had them in the first place.

Matt Game Wasted our time, thanks a lot.

Maggie Bruce GROUPOLA! PLEASE PROVIDE A WORKING UNSUBSCRIBE LINK NOW _ I WANT NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU IN THE FUTURE AT ALL

As I write this, its only 10.30am UK time, and the above are just a tiny selection of the negative comments left on the Facebook page.

The deal is certainly picking up some good backlinks though. The Guardian ran the “story” here, much to the annoyance of their readers, who have left comments such as:

Jameswales There are already so many scammy “win an iPhone/iPad” competitions out there. Why does the Guardian believe this one is worthy of a news story. You should be ashamed to be running this.

Chrisbeach Lost a lot of respect for the Guardian’s Money section after reading this “article”

Fifeman58 How to get a free ad in the Guardian

1. Buy an iPhone for £499
2. Advertise it for £99
3. Get free publicity in the Guardian and a slew of email subscribers – total cost £400.

I thought I had stumbled onto the Daily Express or Daily Mail site for a nanosecond!

Hiphoppopotamus Holy fucking shit. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

It’s like one of those flashing ‘you are our 1 millionth customer – click for a free laptop!’ banner ads, only in credulous newspaper item form.

I’ll make 2 iPhones (for that is probably what they mean by ‘limited’) available for £99 if it buys me an article on a formerly respected national newspaper’s website.

I’d be interested in knowing exactly how many phones they had available at the price. But that’s something that an actual fucking journalist would try to find out, isn’t it?

I’m done with this toilet of a website. Hippo out.

Whoever it was in the Groupola team that managed to get that fluff piece article published in The Guardian certainly deserves a pay rise I don’t think its unreasonable to describe it as nothing more than a glorified advert. It certainly didn’t go down well with The Guardian readers, that’s for sure.

RealBusiness.co.uk have also reported on this, with an article titled Groupola: iPhone deal backfires. From their article:

Groupola’s website has crashed under the strain of web traffic, and rumours are circulating on Twitter that the whole deal may have been a con.

While we’re not suggesting this is the case, Groupola and Mark Pearson are certainly now feeling the wrath of the Twittersphere.

Here’s a representative sample of comments on Groupola:

“You shouldn’t run these deals if you can’t hack it!” - @iamsimonallen

“Spoke to @groupola over the phone, seems all the iphones have been sold. Surprising as no one can get through” – @Dean_Malik

“Everybody knows it was a CON. Watch your followers DWINDLE. CHEATS.” – @Gaspodesm8

“After today’s email harvesting scam, I pledge to cancel my @groupola membership & unsub.” - lee_baines

Update: Groupola have now released a statement:

Groupola is currently experiencing a number of website issues which means that it appears down to a high number of users. This is because of the sheer volume of people that are trying to access the website to take advantage of the iPhone4 deal.

Between 9 and 9.30am this morning more than five million people have attempted to log on to the site, far more than was anticipated. We can confirm that a number of people have already bought iPhones for £99. We are working hard to get the site back to its optimum and the iPhone4 deal will continue to run until stocks run out.

I find it hard to believe that the stocks have not already ran out, but they don’t want to stop sending traffic to their site I am sure.

So when the dust settles, was this all worth it for Groupola? They’ve got some great backlinks and a massively inflated email subscriber list, but on the other hand they have a temporarily non-loading site, a lot of annoyed customers, and their own Facebook page currently looks like a disaster.

Is the statement “no such thing as bad publicity” no longer true in the age of Twitter, Facebook and blogs? Or do these things in fact make it even more correct?

If you use Fantastico to do a 1 click install of WordPress from a Hostgator account, you will get this in your footer:

Seems like Hostgator have decided to give themselves a nice anchor text rich link, pointing back to  http://www.hostgator.com/wordpress-hosting.shtml?utm_source=fantastico&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=wordpress

At no point in the process are you asked if you consent to them doing this, or given a chance to opt out.  They make no mention of it whatsoever.

They are doing this via a plugin:

This all looks a bit sleazy to me – there is absolutely no benefit  whatsoever to the customer by having this plugin installed. I definitely don’t like the way they deliberately don’t mention they are going to give themselves a footer link. I guess they just hope you aren’t going to notice…

If you check the official WordPress plugin site, it says:

There are only a few restrictions

1. Your plugin must be GPLv2 Compatible.
2. The plugin most not do anything illegal, or be morally offensive (that’s subjective, we know).
3. You have to actually use the subversion repository we give you in order for your plugin to show up on this site. The WordPress Plugins Directory is a hosting site, not a listing site.
4. The plugin must not embed external links on the public site (like a “powered by” link) without explicitly asking the user’s permission.
5. If you don’t specify a v2-compatible license, what you check in is explicitly GPLv2.

Hostgator are clearly breaking number 4. Given that their plugin does absolutely nothing outside of add an unwanted footer link, I can’t imagine WordPress would be impressed with them doing this.

So which is it, genius link building, or a shocking way to treat paying customers? Let me know below!

24th June Update: It seems Hostgator are backtracking on this move. Dmytro Antypov, an SEO Consultant in Kyiv, just emailed me the following after complaining to Hostgator.

“Dmytro,

Thank you for your feedback regarding the HostGator plugin for wordpress. We have made a change to our installs that now require the end user click a check box if they want the plugin to be installed.

If you see any further issues or have any questions at all please let me know and I will personally assist you.

Thank you,

Josh xxxxxxx
Customer Service Manager
HostGator LLC. / SeoHosting.Com”

Is there such a thing as building too many links if you’re following Google guidelines exactly? Too many that you would get banned, even if you were following the rules?

Matt Cutts response:

So basically Matt is saying you can never have too many links – provided they look are natural.

As the owner of a SEO Company we’re mostly interested in the high quality backlinks a particular campaign can deliver. This is because high quality backlinks mean great rankings on Google and the benefit of organically built links far exceed any paid links that can be easily bought. As an added benefit, you don’t have any of the risks associated with paid links.

Whether you’re just starting to incorporate viral marketing into your online strategy or if you’ve already started creating viral campaigns I’m going to hopefully give you a few tips so you can use viral marketing to not only create buzz & additional exposure for your brand but also those highly valuable backlinks your website so desperately needs to perform well on Google.

When link-building is your primary concern, you need to build your campaigns around getting the most links possible, a campaign that has been tailored so that its primary aim is to get links will acquire far more links than a general campaign that hasn’t. With that in mind, here are some ideas that will help encourage people to link to your sites:

1. Create a “badge” with a link within badge so any people installing the badge will automatically link back to your site. Do note that if you have an anchor text link below the badge, don’t use keywords that are very spammy, I’d suggest you stick with the site name.

2. Creating great resources is another way to encourage linking, “infographics” are very popular at the moment and people seem to love linking to them.

3. Ego viral marketing is also another fantastic way to get links, if people do a test or a quiz and they score well, they are likely to link back to the particular quiz or test so that other people can go and see how smart the first people mentioned is.

Awesome videos, competitions and games are far more traditional forms of viral marketing and in our experience don’t work as well as stuff that’s created around getting backlinks. Also, note that if you create a video, try to avoid using YouTube as people tend to link to the video rather than your actual page or site where it’s placed!

Whenever you create a linking campaign or otherwise, try to identify your link targets BEFORE you conceptualise your campaign, if you can’t identify a several hundred link targets, then your campaign probably won’t have a great chance of success in terms of getting a fair amount of links.

Once you’ve created your campaign, you’re going to need to seed it so that you get thousands of people seeing it and therefore spreading it and finally a tiny percentage of them will link to it. Some of my favourite ways of seeding a viral campaign are as follows:

1. Social Media: Getting your campaign “hot” on Digg, Facebook and StumbleUpon

2. Top Blog Review: Having a trusted blogger with a big readership mention your viral campaign and you’re likely to hit a homerun.

3. Pay-Per-Click advertising: Google and Facebook work well for some initial traction if it suits your campaign.

4. Emailing webmasters individually: This does work and should be part of any viral resource based campaign.

One golden rule to follow is to ask yourself: “Why would people want to link to this?” If you can answer honestly, and think people have a reason then your campaign has a chance, if not, then you probably don’t.

Backlinks.com Pricing

Text Link rates are as follows (per month) per text link. If you spend $500 or more per month, additional discounts are available.

PageRank (PR) 0 homepage/subpage $.50
PageRank (PR) 1 homepage $1 , subpage $1
PageRank (PR) 2 homepage $2 , subpage $2
PageRank (PR) 3 homepage $4 , subpage $3
PageRank (PR) 4 homepage $6 , subpage $4
PageRank (PR) 5 homepage $9 , subpage $7
PageRank (PR) 6 homepage $25 , subpage $20
PageRank (PR) 7 homepage $60 , subpage $50
PageRank (PR) 8 homepage $150 , subpage $100

The prices certainly look tempting, and they say have more than 18,000 pages that you can buy links on.

Getting started

It was extremely easy to get going – fill in a few basic details and I was in right away.  You can then add “target” pages that you want to build links to, then search for suitable pages to link from.  Once I done this, I realised you can’t actually view the url’s of sites you want to buy on until you buy credits.

I understand why they are doing this, but this is like being told at the door of Hugo Boss you need to pay for the suit before you come in. What if you try it on and don’t like it? I guess its tough luck.

One thing I really hate is when people offer seo services without fully explaining the risks involved. If you want to do something risky that is fine – but you need to know the dangers to make an informed decision.

here has been a lot of discussion over this on numerous web forums and SEO websites. Google’s official policy is that they don’t approve of “paid” text links. However they themselves sell sponsored text links on their own search results pages. Text link selling/buying remains a vital part of increasing search engine rankings and you can almost guarantee that any website listed highly in Google’s organic search results has done so. Thus is is really a necessity for businesses to successfully match their competition in many cases.

I don’t like the text above (from their FAQ page) at all. It plays down the risks and likens buying and selling links to what Google is doing, but that is a stretch of the truth to say the least. Sure, Google technically sell links in the form of Adwords, but those links do not pass any seo benefit. Comparing that to selling text links for seo benefits is bizarre.

They then go on to say:

Our service has been around for at least 3 years and we have had no reports of Google banning our customers for buying or selling text links. This is because our installation code/software used to publish the sold links is not detectable by the search engine bots. The paid links are simple, html based links that appear as natural as other links on the web pages where they appear. If Google started really penalizing websites for buying text links this also implies that your competitors could intentionally buy links to point to your website in an effort to harm your rankings. Such a scenario seems highly unlikely and there would be an industry wide outrage over such practices.

Again playing down the risks involved. Another black mark against Backlinks.com.  As we all know, Google can, and do, regularly penalise sites for link buying and selling.

The actual links

Okay with that stuff out the way, lets take a look at what our money gets us. I’m not going to out sites, so I will just give descriptions of the sites themselves.

I decided for the review we would look at finance links with pagerank 5, so I put that information into the search box and it only returned 2 sites. One of them had a network holding page on it, and the other was a “finance blog” that was built on a site that used to be a Finland student guide! It was immediately obvious from looking at the domain alone that this site didn’t begin its life as a finance site, so there is no way whatsoever you would want a link on it under its current form.  Not a good start whatsoever, but not enough information to base a full review on. Modifying the search to instead look at “health” sites with pagerank 5 returned 33 sites, so we will base the review on that.

Looking at the first site from the health list, again it is blatant that the site never began its life in the niche it is currently in.  This one used to belong to a mobile network, until it dropped on the 8th May (2 weeks ago) and the current owner built a health insurance blog on it.  At this point I was starting to get disheartened, was I going to find a single site I’d actually want a link on?

The next one on the list looked a lot more promising – a “healthy foods” blog which at least had the word “food” in the domain so probably hadn’t been changed to a more easily monetizable niche.  When I examined the backlinks in Yahoo site explorer, the top 10 sites listed all no longer link to the domain in question. The links must have been removed recently. So you’re paying for a pagerank 5 site here, but it doesn’t actually have any real pagerank to pass. To make matters worse, of those 10 backlinks I checked, 8 of them had the exact same template on – immediately obvious it had been part of a network.

The next domain, I couldn’t check the actual page the link was on. They use a weird wavy text to show you the url, embedded in an image. As you need to be signed in to see these url’s, this is completely pointless. This url had about 100 characters in it, after seeing the above there was no way I was going to spend quarter of an hour trying to work out what each letter was, and typing them one at a time. So I just looked at the root domain, which was a chinese domain(.cn).  When I went to the url all I can see is text saying “bad request – invalid host name”. Whether the page that you can buy links on actually loads, I’m unsure.

Looking at the site in archive.org, it used to be a Chinese language site, topic unknown. It definitely wasn’t an English language “health and fitness” blog like they are advertising it as though.

The next one up was advertised as a “Lose weight blog”. Checking the site on Archive.org shows that it used to be a technology association site from the Philippines.  So basically yet another site you definitely wouldn’t want a link on.

And now we move onto the next one, a “health and fitness blog”. The site doesn’t actually load, so buying a link on here would be a complete waste of time right now.  The site isn’t listed in Archive.org so I cannot tell you for sure what it used to be, but looking at its backlinks all of its incoming pagerank is coming from Chinese language sites again. I think its fair to say this is yet another site that didn’t actually start out as an English health site.

The next one was again a massive url that I didn’t feel like trying to type in, so again I’ll just look at the root url. From the domain alone it was obviously not going to be worth wasting 10 minutes trying to decypher the full url.  This one is a Chinese science website, although it does have an English version.

Next up is another page from the same Chinese site we started with. Not sure why backlinks.com are choosing to show them as separate sites, it just makes everything take longer and be a pain to use.  After this one I tried to view another site, only to be told I can only see 5 url’s per day.  I’m not quite sure how you are meant to do any real backlink building if you can only see 5 url’s. Maybe they expect you just to keep buying them blindly without doing any checking.

At this point I thought I’d seen enough to conclude that the links are complete garbage.

Payments for backlinks.com links

As I mentioned above, you need to actually pay before you see the links. I wasn’t impressed with that to begin with, and having seen the links I am even more unhappy about it now. I’ve not seen a single site I would have been willing to take a link on, but I have already got my credit card out and handed over the cash.  At this point you can either choose to write the money off, or take links you don’t want.  To be honest, the links are that bad I would recommend the first option.

You need to sign up with a monthly paypal subscription for credits. To make matters worse, the credits don’t roll over to the next month – you need to use them or lose them.  You can’t buy links one off, so even if you were regularly using their service you would be losing money every single month as its unlikely you would be able to use the exact number of credits that you have.

Conclusion

I simply cannot recommend this service at all. The sites are extremely low quality, and with them being dropped domains and/or changed niches, they are potentially dangerous.

Their payment system is designed around forcing you to lose cash every month and get nothing in return.

They deliberately make it hard for you to see where you will be buying links, by making the url’s so that you cannot copy or paste them, and then only let you see 5 of them per day.

They also force you to pay them before you even get to see any urls. So right now I don’t have a single link from them, but they get to keep my money. Nice work if you can get it!

If you have any experience with them, feel free to leave a comment. Also I’m taking requests for what you want me to review next. Let me waste my money so you don’t have to

One question that crops up quite often and even more so from clients. As SEO’s begin to explain some of their Link Building techniques to clients, one common response I get is “So surely we just need to get thousands of links?” Now depending on what technique each SEO uses, depends on the link “exposure” that your site will be subject too.

Personally I work with a lower Quantity of links and work towards a higher Quality of links in order to obtain more power in a small amount of time. However when working with new sites I have found that a large influx of lower Quality links has been able to help boost a sites initial performance.

When I say low Link Quality I do not mean Spam, low Link Quality refers to those links that are on less powerful pages and domains (Low Pagerank and low inbound link rates). Higher Quality links refer to links from Guest Blogs, where you are permitted to place a post on a high ranking and high Pagerank website with a single outbound link. These links will raise suspicion in the first instance because if you have been using Low Quality links, a sudden rise in more powerful ones may be sand boxed (a testing period implemented by Google to check the validity of links/content/site updates).

High Quality links are noticed by Google ore regularly than lower Quality links, which means that the Google Bot notices your website more frequently. The lower Quality Links don’t get “Crawled” as often as the more powerful ones, but because they are in such large amount one link may get crawled and others on a later date.

The main point to understand is that the higher Quality links will pass on more power to your website improving positions at a faster rate (although they are difficult to obtain). The Lower Quality links are much easier to obtain, but do not have the same sort or strength.

Verdict: This may sound as though I am sitting on the fence, but using both of these tactics is the best. Higher Quality links should be used to obtain positions in the top ten, whereas the Lower Quality links can help get to the second page, as long as they are in high amounts. So a mixture of these can help to obtain top results in Google!

Bio:

Marcus Travels around the world in search of new SEO techniques, typically a Luxury holidays Blogger, Marcus explores all aspects of SEO.

You can get yourself a highly trusted link from a site with a pagerank 8 homepage for absolutely no cost – and you get to support a charity whilst doing it.

Sounds good? Well all you need to do is head over to Kiva.org and sign up for an account. Kiva is an organisation that partners up with entrepeneurs in the 3rd world, giving them loans to set themselves up in business.

This is where you come in – you just need to create a profile, choose one lender and give them a minimum of $25. Once you have done this, you will be able to add a backlink to your profile.

This money will go towards setting someone up in business. Whether its to set up a fruit stall in Liberia or to help fund a flour selling business in Togo, you will get the cash returned to you in full once the person you are helping is in profit.

Its an absolutely brilliant system – you make one small payment which you get back later anyway, and you know you have helped make a massive change to a families quality of life.

You can check out an example profile with a link in it here.

So why not do a good deed today, head on over to Kiva and get a little thank you backlink into the bargain!