I have researched SEO for years. I have just tried over and over to build one site that I was proud of where I am in Google's index. I studied SEO from the time the internet started. The gurus were saying at that time it is all about your Meta Tags. I looked at my competition, did good keyword density, and made my meta tags better. I figured I would easily outrank the competition. After months of waiting I saw no results. The best part was some of these sites who were reputable corporations had keywords like XXX and Nudity. They did this to try to capture people searching for those terms, though they were unrelated and probably didn't convert well, they were free people viewing your website. Even after nearly duplicating sites, I never improved my rankings.
So then I got into the impression that the size of the site had a lot to do with ranking. Some of the topics I have chosen to build websites on were impossible to build a large site on. Every number one site I saw on google though, if you did a site:http://www.domain.com search had thousands of indexed pages. Then I stumbled upon a program called Traffic Booster Pro. This was the answer to my question. This program basically builds a bunch of junk pages that take content from RSS feeds and make it unique by randomizing the words. It creates thousands of pages all optimized and linked together, and generates a sitemap. Google was crawling my site like crazy. And for one of the most searched words on the internet, I ranked in position 60 within a few weeks. I was so excited, I thought for sure I was right, I needed the bigger site, the larger the site the better I would rank. If I couldn't build that many pages, this program would do it for me, but when my users click on one of those they are redirected to my main page. I got some traffic for a while, and then one day my site crashed for about an hour. The reason it crashed is because Google was crawling it so much the traffic overloaded the data center that I was housing my information. Not the server I was on, the entire data center. My sitemap tracked in Google Sitemaps had thousands of errors. I had my datacenter folks get back online. When I checked my rankings I found all those keywords I was ranked for were dropped to nothing. I went from 60 to not in the top 1000. I thought this would be rectified soon, I adjusted my crawl rate, let my data center know this site was taking a lot of traffic. I waited 2 months and my rankings never came back. The site I had has a unique domain name that is not even a word, and to this day that site doesn't even rank number one for the domain name. Therefore that site has been penalized, there is no other answer.
I studied some Guru's and they said link exchanges were effective. The more links the better. I joined a site called Linkmarket.net and set up my page to exchange links. This is worthless, 400 links later I didn't see a change in rankings. I decided to see if the Guru's were really using this strategy. I go on their websites and they have no partner directories or instructions on exchanging links. They already know this is ineffective. I again so no results from this action. Links do help though. A search for click here on Google leads to a result of number one for Adobe. Best part is Adobe doesn't have the words click here anywhere on the page. Links work, just not exchanged links.
To answer the question no you should not EXCHANGE links. There are two ways to get links to your site that impact your rankings. First of all you share information like this. This article is going to get a bunch of links to my site, and help my rankings, and all I do is share my experience. I do this several times a day with several topics that have to do with my sites. So how do I get links that help my site.
There really are two ways like I said. Link bait, and content sharing. Link bait is like the chicken website for Burger King if you can remember that. If you saw it you would remember it was a guy in a chicken suit on video that did stupid things. It ranked Burger King number one for the single word chicken. That is quite a jump. It was people liked it an virally linked to it from their sites. The drawback to link bait is you better be extremely creative, or have someone build link bait for an astronomical price. There is a better way.
I prefer to use content sharing like this article you are reading. I publish informative articles and distribute them to directories that webmasters go to get content for their site. If people like my information they will publish my article. For instance this article will probably get published by SEO website trying to provide current advice on improving rankings. This benefits the webmaster because if they are constantly adding new content spiders will hit their site more, therefore each change will be indexed faster. That catch is that to use my content they must provide a link back to me in my resource box. This box cannot be modified. If no webmaster likes my article, it is still published in 1000s of directories that I submit to, creating great links back to my website. I do not have an outbound link on my site. I have meta tags that are almost worthless, but my 3 page site ranks very well for keywords due to content sharing.
To conclude it won't hurt to have a well coded big site, but that is not what pulls rankings. The best rankings I ever obtained are from submitting articles. I love to write the different articles and share information or knowledge I have for free. Also Google can tell that I am manually writing these because there is no duplicate information in them across the network. So they know that I am not trying to steal rankings, that I am providing legit information and a link to my site. This causes each link to have a nice weight with google. My job has become to promote my website through distributing information.
So then I got into the impression that the size of the site had a lot to do with ranking. Some of the topics I have chosen to build websites on were impossible to build a large site on. Every number one site I saw on google though, if you did a site:http://www.domain.com search had thousands of indexed pages. Then I stumbled upon a program called Traffic Booster Pro. This was the answer to my question. This program basically builds a bunch of junk pages that take content from RSS feeds and make it unique by randomizing the words. It creates thousands of pages all optimized and linked together, and generates a sitemap. Google was crawling my site like crazy. And for one of the most searched words on the internet, I ranked in position 60 within a few weeks. I was so excited, I thought for sure I was right, I needed the bigger site, the larger the site the better I would rank. If I couldn't build that many pages, this program would do it for me, but when my users click on one of those they are redirected to my main page. I got some traffic for a while, and then one day my site crashed for about an hour. The reason it crashed is because Google was crawling it so much the traffic overloaded the data center that I was housing my information. Not the server I was on, the entire data center. My sitemap tracked in Google Sitemaps had thousands of errors. I had my datacenter folks get back online. When I checked my rankings I found all those keywords I was ranked for were dropped to nothing. I went from 60 to not in the top 1000. I thought this would be rectified soon, I adjusted my crawl rate, let my data center know this site was taking a lot of traffic. I waited 2 months and my rankings never came back. The site I had has a unique domain name that is not even a word, and to this day that site doesn't even rank number one for the domain name. Therefore that site has been penalized, there is no other answer.
I studied some Guru's and they said link exchanges were effective. The more links the better. I joined a site called Linkmarket.net and set up my page to exchange links. This is worthless, 400 links later I didn't see a change in rankings. I decided to see if the Guru's were really using this strategy. I go on their websites and they have no partner directories or instructions on exchanging links. They already know this is ineffective. I again so no results from this action. Links do help though. A search for click here on Google leads to a result of number one for Adobe. Best part is Adobe doesn't have the words click here anywhere on the page. Links work, just not exchanged links.
To answer the question no you should not EXCHANGE links. There are two ways to get links to your site that impact your rankings. First of all you share information like this. This article is going to get a bunch of links to my site, and help my rankings, and all I do is share my experience. I do this several times a day with several topics that have to do with my sites. So how do I get links that help my site.
There really are two ways like I said. Link bait, and content sharing. Link bait is like the chicken website for Burger King if you can remember that. If you saw it you would remember it was a guy in a chicken suit on video that did stupid things. It ranked Burger King number one for the single word chicken. That is quite a jump. It was people liked it an virally linked to it from their sites. The drawback to link bait is you better be extremely creative, or have someone build link bait for an astronomical price. There is a better way.
I prefer to use content sharing like this article you are reading. I publish informative articles and distribute them to directories that webmasters go to get content for their site. If people like my information they will publish my article. For instance this article will probably get published by SEO website trying to provide current advice on improving rankings. This benefits the webmaster because if they are constantly adding new content spiders will hit their site more, therefore each change will be indexed faster. That catch is that to use my content they must provide a link back to me in my resource box. This box cannot be modified. If no webmaster likes my article, it is still published in 1000s of directories that I submit to, creating great links back to my website. I do not have an outbound link on my site. I have meta tags that are almost worthless, but my 3 page site ranks very well for keywords due to content sharing.
To conclude it won't hurt to have a well coded big site, but that is not what pulls rankings. The best rankings I ever obtained are from submitting articles. I love to write the different articles and share information or knowledge I have for free. Also Google can tell that I am manually writing these because there is no duplicate information in them across the network. So they know that I am not trying to steal rankings, that I am providing legit information and a link to my site. This causes each link to have a nice weight with google. My job has become to promote my website through distributing information.
About the Author:
Brent Sweet is the President of Article Submission Express. This is a company that can help you distribute articles such as this through the internet for instant links to your site, and improved rankings. Click here to read more about Article Submission.
No comments:
Post a Comment