Links Links Links… I love Links!
I, like many webmasters who had some early success, (not that there are many of them, but many as in a lot of us who had success early) have spent years and years working away on making money online. Toiling away to strike it rich. While we are living the dream of many beginner MMOers, we’ve been growing our knowledge, learning better methods, reading everything, and building better sites. Well ladies and gentlemen, I have a confession to make. I’ve gotten worse at MMO. I’ve gotten stupider pretty much every day since I finally broke the $100/day mark.
I know what you are thinking… “Oh another blog post about how it’s all about ‘writing’… “good content”… “connecting”… blah blah blah joy”. You’re right that I’ve known how to write for a long time, but that’s not it. I like to think I’m a decently smart guy, and maybe it’s good to provide smart useful content, but that’s not it either. It’s certainly not making a ton of facebook friends for any purpose than to pretend that my site is popular and therefore trustworthy to buy off of. No ladies and gentlemen, I’m talking about the single most important factor in earning a living online, LINKS.
What I used to do: GET LINKS. From where? Everywhere. I lived and died by the mantra “there’s no such thing as a bad link”. Do you have a money site? Good send it every piece of crap link you can get. Bookmarking demon links? Yup! AMA links? Yup! Duplicate content links? Yep! Forum links? Directory links? No follow links? Do follow links? Yep! Yep! Yep! Yep! I didn’t worry about hiding links, or sending my crappy links through better links (although I have always backlinked my backlinks as much as possible as well). That folks is how my main money site has 45,265 links! That folks is why my main money site made $33,587 in the past year!
Since then I’ve become picky… when I start a new site I send it a few links. Slowly. I worry about the poor little sandbox. I worry what if google sees all these crap links I’m sending and I get flagged. I worry about always sending links through another high quality link. Well guys, NO MORE. I’ve decided from this day forth I will be sending every link I can get right straight at my money sites, and you know what if google finds 50% of them… heck 15% of them… I’ll still be FAR ahead of where I’ll be by treating every one of my sites like it’s a little angel. Consider this my retirement from being a cautious webmaster.
If you want to throw me a solid then send a bunch of links to this site with the anchor “make money online”. The more the merrier.
–De-Man Out!
Poor Customer Service From CyberHub: A Review
I’ve used CyberHub for years now and spent literally thousands of dollars buying content from them. They charge $0.006/word which is pretty hard to beat on the internet. Sure my outsourcers write a little cheaper than that, but when I want big amounts of content I use CyberHub… that is until now. Almost a year ago (March 27 & 30, 2010) I put in a big order with them for around $200 worth of content and it STILL hasn’t been sent. I send them emails about my orders (CH08689 & CH08781) and they DO NOT respond… at all.
CyberHub has always been slow, and I’ve tolerated that because I send big orders and they offer good prices. But what I won’t tollerate is people ignoring my emails, and essentially STEALING my money.
Now I’ll admit that I have used their service since then, and they have actually responded to support requests about other orders, but when I email about my old orders they won’t send me a thing. So let’s hope that heading out in the blogging world and posting about their poor service on a popular MMO blog will be enough to get them off their butts, and I’ll make a note here if they rectify the situation, but for now:
DO NOT USE CYBERHUB!
Even better, send them an email to admin@cyberhubonline.com and tell them that you won’t be using their service so long as you hear about things like this you never will.
Anyway just a quick warning to people, and a quick lesson to CyberHub about providing crappy service to people… you never know who has a voice.
Best Link Building Practices
Ok so to continue my trend of writing about debates I have with people on the Keyword Academy forums I thought today I would write about best link building practices. There are important things to keep in mind while building links, but like most aspects of MMO ‘winning’ it is accomplished 99% through doing and 1% through thinking. So as my first point the most important thing about link building is just go out and do it instead of worrying about how to do it. A “no follow” link is better than no link at all. A link that is anchored with “click here” is worth more than no link at all. Are they the best, no, but they aren’t completely worthless either.
Ok so the ultimate thing we want to do is to try as best we can to make our links look natural to Google. That is essentially the goal of everything we do when building links. So the real question is what can I do to make my links look natural?
- Vary your anchor text – Natural links occur and get anchored in a ton of different ways. Don’t just anchor your one target keyword for every link you get, anchor things that are close to it, misspellings, your URL, your site name, and even the odd “click here”
- Deep linking – People who get natural links don’t just get links to their homepage, in fact a lot of the time people send their friends links to interesting articles or write about cool things they see on a site. Deep linking to your individual pages is important and a lot of the time is can be profitable too because you can use your deep pages to target more keywords.
- Quality vs. Quantity – What’s the answer to this old question? Well the answer is both. If all you get are crappy links well then your site is going to take forever to rank, but you don’t need to worry about getting every link from a PR9 site. A link from a forum isn’t going to give you as much value as a link from the NY times, but 1000 might and might be easier to get.
- Blogroll vs. In Content – There is always a lot of debate around blogroll and how valuable they are. A lot of people (some of whom make a lot more money than I do) say in content links are the only way to go, but I can tell you I’ve had more than my fair share of luck with blogrolls. Mix it up and get both.
- Speed – When you start a new site you don’t want to blast the links out too fast. Instead start out slowly and build up momentum like an avalanche . Eventually you’ll be able to send your site as many links as you want, but the growth needs be be slow and natural.
- Related Niche – Sites from a related niche are better than links from an unrelated site. Google looks not only what links are pointing to your site, but what links (internal and external) are pointing to your links.
- Links from the Same Site – The more sites you build links from the better. Don’t think that two links from the same site isn’t providing you any value, but two links from two different sites are better than two links from the same site. This is not only good for authority, but it’s diversity. If one of those sites go away at least you still have one link when you could potentially not have any links left.
Anyway that’s just a basic overview of the best linking practices. I’m sure we could think up experiment after experiment to test out each best practice, but hey, it’s not worth the time when you could be spending it just building links. Now stop reading and go get yourself some links.
Link Farms
So I figured it was just about time for me to sit down and finally write another post and just when I started to think about this I happened across a debate at the Keyword Academy forums about link farms and offered my two ‘godly’ cents.
First off I’ll start with the disclaimer:
I do not personally use, nor do I advocate the use of, link farms or any other link building method that seeks to manipulate Google’s system.
And I suppose with that disclaimer I should add another:
I do know there are many people who use link farms that make a lot of money and are very successful doing it. But what works today may get you banned tomorrow. So, proceed at your own risk!
With that out of the way let’s start with defining exactly what a link farm is:
- Traditionally: A network of self owned sites from which one links to another self owned site. Basically you buy a bunch of domains, post content on them, and use them to send anchored links to your money site in order to climb the SERPs.
- Self hosting domains
- http://wordpress.com
- http://www.blogger.com
- Modern: A network of sites which you have paid access to from which you can post links to your sites. Basically you pay some money to someone for access to their large network of sites, you write articles (some spun, some 100% unique), and in those articles you can link to your own sites.
- Build My Rank
- LinxBoss
- Postrunner at The Keyword Academy
- Broad: Any site that allows people to post content in exchange for anchored ‘do-follow’ links back to their own sites. Basically you give us something we give you something, so no matter how you slice it that does fall in a broad definition of link farming.
- http://ezinearticles.com
- http://hubpages.com
- http://wordwolf.com
So anyway now that all that preliminary junk is out of the way, the first assertion that I was arguing against was that Google could algorithmically sniff out link farms easily and either a) devalue their links or b) deindex the farms completely. I suppose this is not an unreasonable assumption, Google works with an algorithm as the base of their search and they do that pretty well. The problem for Google arises because allowing a few link farm websites ‘costs’ (in creditability, algorithmic accuracy, annoyance of people) them far less then the alternative of wiping out all link farms and causing some collateral damage as well. I agree that Google has an interest in getting rid of bad links, and getting rid of programs like BMR is one of Matt Cutts’ goals as spam king. I don’t think Google will ever be able to wipe out these types of farms completely, but if they can get rid of even some of the sites these programs use then there is some devaluation of the linking power over time so people who use these techniques need to know that over time rankings will slip if they don’t keep building links and therefore their income isn’t truly passive.
The other argument that ensued was the debate over whether or not the postrunner system constituted a ‘link farm’ of sorts. Let’s not kid ourselves about the difference people, PRN is designed to manipulate googles system therefore it’s always at risk too, which is why high standards are maintained and people need to be sure to keep the junk off their sites or some of them may be devalued or deindexed as well.
Anyway the point is that if you use link farms I wouldn’t suggest relying on them solely and you should always be trying to grow your natural link profile. It’s the only safe way. And remember the best way, and the only completely risk free way, to get any backlink is to get them naturally by providing high quality original content on your site!
–Justin (and Trent)
