Why You Should Avoid 'Page Swap' Link Exchange Proposals
Building Web site traffic
As is fairly common, I recently received an email from someone seeking to crosslink our two sites. It is always a wee bit of a surprise when these messages arrive, though, given my article
How not to build traffic: respond to email solicitations of Link Exchanges. You'd think they'd at least reference the points made in that article in their email!
Okay, I said in my response, tell me how you would propose we accomplish this. Well, his second message with the details of the proposed exchange - to build traffic on both our sites and increase our mutual page ranks, of course - quite startled me...
Thanks for the reply. We would like to host some pages on free-web-money.com. For Example: www.free-web-money.com/partypoker.html, www.free-web-money.com/pokergames.html etc. These pages will be linked from your Homepage for navigation.
Kindly let me know if this is acceptable to you and also your expectations for each page. Hope to hear from you soon.
It's a nice enough email and sounds reasonable upon first glance, but if you think about what's being proposed here, this is a kind of link exchange that you should always avoid: they're asking to have a page of links and 'context' (the all-important link context that Google wants to see) on your site in exchange, presumably, for a single text link back to your site from their own. If you're desperate and really did want to pursue this sort of proposal, I would at least suggest that you charge the other party a significant advertising fee for a set of links rather than just one.
I mean, really, does this kind of "swap" sound equitable to you?
I didn't think so.
Just as important as the value of links is the ownership of content. Whether you're building a site with the intent of having some Google goodness or whether you're creating a site that has lots of good information and just incidentally has advertising, you should always retain tight control over your content because if a page is part of your domain, you own it. People who come to your site from a search engine (and 80% of Web site traffic - or more - is a result of searches and clicking directly onto a subsidiary page) have no way of knowing who created a specific page, so it's all lumped into content with your name on it.
And in that context, no, I'd much rather not have pages on this site talking about poker and other gambling games anyway, even if there was a nice payment involved.
What would you do in this situation?
I've recently introduced a new Web site called
College Finances.com and I'd encourage everyone to spend some time really
looking at the layout of the site, the links between the pages, and much more:
college-finances.com.
Here's what you should look for at College Finances.com:
There are many more aspects to the page design and layout that are intended to help its rank and findability: see how many you can find
on the site!
How not to build traffic: respond to email solicitations of Link Exchanges
Building Web site traffic
Here's an email message that I received today, quite similar to email messages I receive at least a half-dozen times each day:
I am contacting you about cross linking. I am interested in real life debt because it looks like it's relevant to a site for which I am seeking links.
Not too bad, so far. But read on...
The site offers a comprehensive selection of over 6,000 technology products at academic prices including computer hardware, software, and books. With a Page Rank of 5, the site has an excellent reputation in the industry. It has a very professional look and feel.
I'll keep the web address confidential and will send it to you only if you give me permission to do so. Just let me know if it's OK, and I'll send you the web address for your review. If you approve of the site, then the intention is to exchange links.
Looking forward to your reply.
Sincerely,
Ritchie Hilario - Sr. Link Builder
P.S. If for any reason you don't want me to contact you again, email me with the words "NO EMAIL" as the subject of your message.
Link Builder
Apartado Postal #18
Tijuana, B.C. 22432
Can you see what's wrong with this message? If "Ritchie Hilario" is genuinely interested in cross-linking, she's going about it all wrong. First off, using Google to search for Ritchie's name reveals no results at all, suggesting that it's a fake name. Strike one.
Secondly, a spammy opt-out "NO EMAIL" postscript is a sure sign that this isn't someone sitting at their keyboard, finding my Web site, and then genuinely requesting a link but rather someone using a mostly automated application that blasts out thousands of these sort of link exchange requests. Strike two.
Thirdly, did you notice the "legal mailing address" at the bottom of the email? It's there because of the toothless CAN-SPAM law and as much as I'd like to think that the border town of Tijuana has a thriving Internet business community, it's pretty darn clear that it's either a completely bogus address, or at least a post office box that's routinely emptied directly into a trash can. Strike three.
But even more, Google search results and page ranking are influenced much more by them trying to capture algorithmically why a site is linking to another site. I've talked about this extensively on the site, including The Right Way to Link to Pages On Your Site, Three Ways to Adversely Impact your Google Pagerank, and How does Google figure out what pages are more relevant? Pagerank.
With this perspective in mind, it's clearly not a winning strategy to blindly trade links with sites you don't even know about, don't endorse, and wouldn't otherwise link to without the reciprocal link. One way I try to capture this concept myself is to ask: would you link to the site because it's helpful, valuable, and informative for your readers, audience or customer base? If the answer is "no", then you really need to think carefully about whether it makes sense to link to them, regardless of if they offer a link back to your site or not.
And if you do decide to cross link, to accept a link exchange offer, realize that it might actually be a fly-by-night search engine optimization "consultant" (I use the phrase loosely in this context) who will promptly try to sell you on how they can use similarly dubious tactics to help you improve your ranking for only $xxx!
I admit it, a few years ago I was of the mindset that sitemaps were for Web sites that weren't well designed: after all, I reasoned, if the information layout made sense and the content was organized in a coherent and thoughtful way, you'd never need to visit a sitemap because you'd always be able to find what you were seeking directly through the site navigation.
Enter search engines. It turns out that one challenge sites like Google have when they spider a Web site is in finding all the pages on the site. With a tricky site that uses lots of JavaScript for pop-up menus, for example, it might be four or five links off the home page to find that secondary page where you highlight a new product for sale.
And so, a sitemap is a winner. It doesn't have to be pretty, but it should point to each of the major sections and areas of your site, and any other pages you think are critically important. It should definitely be more than a bullet-list of href's, though, so don't succumb to the lazy sitemap design that some applications produce.
An example sitemap that's search engine friendly is the sitemap for this very site: Free Web Money.
Notice on that page that it's in the root directory (not a subdirectory), notice also that links to the sitemap appear on each and every page on this site, and just as importantly, notice that there's a fair bit of verbiage on the sitemap page to add a context to the various links, and that I pay attention to the linked words too (as you should on all pages, as discussed in The right way to link to pages on your site).
Finally, don't create site maps that are more than about 75K (which is pretty darn big) and an optimal number of links is 60-80. Many search engine optimization people believe that pages with more than 100 links can hurt, not help you.
So how's your sitemap looking today?
Three Ways to Adversely Impact your Google Pagerank
Building Web site traffic
Most of the time here at Free Web Money I talk about proactive things you can do to improve your search engine findability, your site's relevance for a specific key word or key phrase. For example, keyword density and page titles have both been explored in depth in previous entries.
Instead, this time I thought it would be useful to talk about a couple of things that you really shouldn't be doing, things that will actually lower your Googel pagerank and, quite likely, your relevance score for the other top search engines too.
The first thing to realize is that too much of a good thing isn't good. Who said "all things in moderation, including moderation itself"? Anyway, they could have been a search engine optimization (SEO) expert, quite frankly!
Don't Use More Than One Title Tag
Here's a trick that would be mildly amusing if it wasn't so darn idiotic: lazy SEO people figure "if titles are important for keywords, then having a bunch of titles will let me load a ton of keywords without anyone being the wiser!". Sadly, though, they're wrong.
How would this look? The HTML source of a page might look like this:
<title>affilate marketing,affiliate marketing programs, affiliate programs, affiliate payout, affiliate links</title>
<title>advertising,advertising banners,google,google adsense,seo,search engine optimization</title>
<title>pay per click, PPC, pay for performance, PPC advertising, ctr, click-thru rate</title>
<title>Joe's House of Search Engine Optimization</title>
The idea here is that your Web browser only shows the
last title tag so you as a visitor are oblivious to this trick, but the Web site developer thinks they've figured out a loophole in "the system" and have stuffed an additional 25 keywords. But Google knows this trick and will penalize you.
Don't Hide Keyword Lists
Another common trick that people use to trick the system is to have keywords where the text is the same color as the background. On a page with a white background this would look like:
<font color="white">pay per click,affiliate program,google adsense</font>
Or, if they're a bit more savvy, they might have this as a CSS style specification with an H1 header:
<h1 style='color:#fff'>pay per click,affiliate program,google adsense</h1>
Again, the idea is that as someone viewing this site, you wouldn't be aware of the keywords in this H1 tag because you wouldn't see the H1 at all: it'd be the same color as the background and would vanish. But Google would see it and rank these keywords even more highly on the page.
Right? Wrong. Google's algorithms are pretty savvy and particularly overt tricks like this are easily picked up and penalized.
Don't Create Link Farms
A third way that you can end up penalized is a bit more sutble: if you have pages that have lots and lots and lots of links pointing to other sites, you could have that page categorized as a so-called "link farm", thereby deprecating any value that a link from your site / page could offer someone else (or another of your sites, for that matter).
In the SEO world, the common belief is that you should never have more than 100 outbound links on a page, and 60-75 is a really good number.
The workaround for this is easy: simply take your links page and break it into more pages. If you have 10 pages with 50 links each, the people to whom you're linking are more likely to get a benefit from your link than if you have 2 pages of 250 links. By the same token, having someone link to you from a link farm page is useless and uninteresting. It certainly won't improve your pagerank (see How does Google Figure out What Pages are More Relevant? Pagerank. for more about pagerank).
There are lots of other ways people try to circumvent the Google pagerank system, among other search engines, and there are lots of SEO specialists (really, I should say "specialists") who just use some shareware app to figure out sneaky and short-term fixes to help your relevance and page rank. And you should avoid all of them, because if your site is blacklisted then you'll likely have to change your domain name and/or IP address to even get back into the Google engine at all. It's not a pretty sight (or pretty site!) and the risk is far too high for any short-term reward on Google.
One question that comes up again and again with online entrepreneurs is whether it's worthwhile to register new domain names for different projects, and if it is, how the heck do you find good domain names!?
First off, keyword-relevant domain names can be a nice boost to your relevance and page rank (as discussed in How does Google figure out what pages are more relevant? Pagerank.) because if it includes the key word or phrase you're using, it further reinforces that your Web site is relevant to that topic. That's why this Web site is called free-web-money.com not "daves-guide-to-adding-neat-stuff-to-your-site.com" or "spliffo.info" or similar.
Now I'm not saying that these type of names can't work, but if I am building, say, an online affiliate bookstore about health books, then healthy-bookstore.com is a better name than "maxbook.com", isn't it? There are tangential questions that arise here too, I'll note, including whether to use dashes in domain names (my tip: no more than two dashes and try to register the non-dash version of the name too) and whether the name needs to be "pronounceable" without having to spell it out (my suggestion: not unless you're planning radio time), but let's push those aside for now in the interest of talking about the "how" of domain names.
Okay, still with me? You've decided that you want a new domain name for your existing or new site, and you just aren' sure how to proceed. After all, aren't all the good domain names taken?
Well, yeah. Most of them are, but if you think both from the perspective of trying to have a key word or keyphrase in the domain name and are willing to live with a dash or two, then it's not quite as bad. Further, there are new top level domains (TLD's as they're called) that can help too: if you can't get a ".com" maybe a ".info" would work instead?
To find domains, I recommend that you go to the Web site of a registrar like mydomain.com or register.com and use their recommendation engine. On mydomain.com, for example, type in a key word like "golf" or "tennis", indicate that you are only interested in .com domains, and it'll pop out a list of available matches. Almost all of those will be kinda dopey, but they can certainly inspire you to iterate and find one that does work.
For example, today (Tuesday, May 25th) I entered "affiliate" and indicated I was interested in .com domains. Here's some of what it listed as possible matches:
hitaffiliate.com
affiliatejob.com
affiliategallery.com
affiliateheadlines.com
popaffiliate.com
spyaffiliate.com
Not too bad, and if you're an entrepreneur like I am, your creative energies should be flowing just from reading that list...
Hmm... affiliateheadlines.com... keep up to date on news in the world of affiliate programs and affiliate marketing...hmmmm.
But this strategy might not work, and you might prefer to have a system that searches for expiring domain names automatically so you can just ride the coattails of someone else who has already gone through the oft-laborious process of finding just the right domain name.
Fortunately, there are some really cool programs that let you do just that, and my favorite of them all is Domains Hourly, which searches expiring domains for key phrases as frequently as once per hour, depending on your setup.
As an example of these results, I have a search for "*baby*" running and here are some of the great - available - domains listed in just one of my reports:
baby-company.com
baby-mode.com
babyblanketsandmore.com
babyboomeruniverse.com
babyshowerplanner.com
babysitclick.com
babysitter2go.com
Again, your brain is probably racing at the opportunities presented by these domains. Imagine what kind of results you could see when it's your own keyword being used as the search key.
Oh, and one more reason to like Domains Hourly: they have a generous affiliate program too. :-)
How does Google figure out what pages are more relevant? Pagerank.
Building Web site traffic
A core question for anyone on the Web, and certainly a question you should be asking if you're trying to monetize your Web site, is how the heck does Google figure out what sites are more relevant to a given search than others?
To get the answer, let's go back in time a little bit and look at the research papers from a Stanford University project called "BackRub". You should certainly recognize the authors...
The BackRub project, of course, was done by two Stanford graduate students, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, and subsequently evolved into Google, the search site and company we all love and from which we all wish we had IPO stock.
Reading the early research reports is surprisingly informative, particularly The Anatomy of a Search Engine, in which Brin and Page explain that the fundamental idea behind Google is that for any given word or phrase, matching Web sites can be ranked for relevance by using something that they called pagerank.
Here's what they have to say about this topic:
"The citation (link) graph of the web is an important resource that has largely gone unused in existing web search engines. We have created maps .. [that] allow rapid calculation of a web page's "PageRank", an objective measure of its citation importance that corresponds well with people's subjective idea of importance. Because of this correspondence, PageRank is an excellent way to prioritize the results of web keyword searches. For most popular subjects, a simple text matching search that is restricted to web page titles performs admirably when PageRank prioritizes the results."
Much more interesting than that, however, is the remarkably simple formula that they use to calculate pagerank in this first generation of Google, which is based almost completely on
how many pages point to it.
Simple, but remarkably elegant: the more links that point to a given page, the more relevant that page must be. Further, take into account the words used to link to a site, and add the title tag of the page itself and you begin to have a pretty decent idea of the theoretical relevance and value of a given site.
If you like mathematical formulas, you'll like this too:
We assume page A has pages T1...Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
Note that the PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all web pages' PageRanks will be one.
Impressive, eh?
Of course, the modern Google pagerank algorithm has over 100 different variables that it takes into account, but the basic concept is still quite true: the more links you have pointing to you, the better your pagerank, and the better your pagerank, the more relevant your site will be for specific searches, and, finally, the more relevant, the higher you'll show in the search results and the more traffic you'll garner from Google searches!
There are a number of different ways to get more inbound links, as they're called, to help boost your pagerank, but an even easier place for you to start if you're eager to improve your own pagerank is to read my article entitled The hidden importance of your page TITLE.
Another good strategy: subscribe to my XML Feed with an RSS reader (learn more about RSS), and you'll have my articles come to your computer without any further effort!
