Archive for the ‘Link Development’ Category

50 Ways To Lose Your Link

1. Demanding placement. If you’re paying, I can see where you feel that you have the right to tell the site owner where you’d like the link, but don’t be too insistent or else you’ll risk them turning you down. If you’re asking nicely and saying “pretty please?” then, unless it’s truly a disastrous spot, just shut up and move on.
2. Indirectly insulting the site. The site owner may be passionate about his work, so why risk putting him off? No one wants to hear that their site is only worth x because it has a PR of y, or that you can help them drastically overhaul it and make it sooooo much better. How are you going to [...]

SEO 101 – Paid Links: To Buy or Not To Buy

Welcome to the latest installment in our SEO 101 series, where we attempt to weed out all the conjecture and give you a very basic understanding of the part of online marketing that we’re most comfortable with…mine being links. Lucky, lucky me. Now, the reason for my choice of paid vs. non-paid links as a subject for 101 is because I think that there’s a huge amount of misinformation about paid links out there, and, being public service-minded (not really), I view it as my goal to explain just what the fuss is all about. After all, if you’re starting to build links, you’re going to soon get into the whole paid vs non-paid debate, right?
Note: We’ve written several good [...]

Emails, Link Requests, and the Death of Politeness

Why are people so freaking nasty? Seriously…WHY?
“I’m not going down on my knees begging you to adore me
Can’t you see it’s misery and torture for me?”
Depeche Mode, Shake the Disease
My link builders are truly lovely people. Well, most of them are. Anyway, they get abused like nobody’s bidness. I’ve reviewed every piece of correspondence that they’re involved with, too, and there’s just nothing there to cause someone to spew the venom that they do, based on getting a polite email. Yes, it may be unsolicited (hell, it’s no secret what we do!) but it’s still nice and really, if it bothers you that much to get an email, to the extent that you write back paragraphs and paragraphs of hate, [...]

Link Building Ideas For The Link Building-Challenged

Since link building is about as fun as ripping off your own toenails with pliers, I thought it might be useful to spark some creative ideas into the heads of poor, depressed link builders. You know who you are. So without further ado, or maybe with lots of further ado, it depends on my mood…
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Top 3 Link Building Ideas For The Link Building-Callenged

Become A Candidate For An Important Political Office
(hint: After announcing your candidacy, say lots of incredibly stupid things that suggest you know nothing about politics. That will score you bonus links).
Note that this option may cost lots of money, but the really cool thing is that there are millions of people willing to just DONATE [...]

Are Widgets Really Linkbuilding?

I had a conversation with one of the organic guys the other guy during which he proclaimed that if you build a kick-ass widget and placed it on a high-traffic site, it would go viral. Ah, bless… the innocence of youth.
His assertion that this was a successful link building campaign led me to ponder whether you can call it link building if all you do is create an application and put a link to it on a high-traffic page. Could you simply create an application and release it into the wild with nothing more than best wishes and call it link building?
I would argue that effort has to be made in any instance to call it work. [...]

The Deep Linking Clampdown…Oh, the Humanity!

*****Editor’s update: Rand has pointed out that I misread the bit about NPR. See below for amendment. *****
Did you ever think that you’d need permission in order to deep link to a site? And for those of you who don’t know, deep linking is the practice of linking to a page on a site other than the home page. It’s what we’re basically supposed to do, to have the most relevant links for our readers.
Apparently this is wreaking absolute havoc with several online publications. The Dallas Morning News has claimed that this practice has contributed to their quick downward spiral into the bowels of hell by “violating copyrights, depriving them of ad dollars, redirecting traffic, and generally confusing Web surfers.” [...]

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