Recently an article published on CNN has again stirred the discussion with their clear approval of link exchange as a valid method for building links. You can read the article at http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/14/cnet.google.link.exchange/index.html. CNN article clearly says,

“exchanging links without offering payment, or crossing obvious lines such as breaking captchas and posting spam links in guestbooks or comment forums, they’re following the spirit of Google’s Webmaster guidelines.”

and points to the fact the Google webmaster guidelines mentions that they do not approve of “Excessive link exchanging” but doesn’t define what they mean by “excessive”. Like all things Google, there is always a subjective parameter that you will have to keep guessing.

With the above logic in place selective link exchange might still work and now that an article like this have hit CNN, I am sure the number of link exchange enthusiasts are going to get a boost.

I personally do not prefer link exchange for link building ( but still I keep getting at least 5 emails a week, saying add my id to Gtalk for link exchange – bunch of F****** Spammers – and yes, I take this opportunity to mention, MEGRISOFT leads them all – I received 7 emails from different guys in this company in last 1 week for link exchange) and prefer other ways of building one way links. However, I do understand that absolutely new sites, particularly the e-commerce websites face immense difficulty in building links and link exchange is probably an easy way to get some initial boost.

In case you resort to link exchange, take care of the following points..
a) Ensure that the partner site is related to your website
b) Check that the website is not having a penalty or ban from Google and are not associated with any link farm or FFA
c) It is good to check the PR of the page that links to you, but PR is not the ultimate. A PR 2 page today can become PR 6 tomorrow, so try to understand the potential of the page and the website.
d) Try not to get links from those traditional links.html / links.php pages with thousands of links. Links from content pages are much better

Having mentioned all these points, I must also add, Link exchange should not be your only way for link building, bring diversity in your back link profile by getting various types of links.

Related Post:
a) How to Build Backlinks for Free
b) How To Build Backlinks with Google

The post Link Exchange Still a Valid Way to Build Links? appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

There are actually more than one ways to get good quality free back links to your website.

a) Directory Submission : Submit your website to good quality directories. There are plenty of directories that are free yet useful. Try to make a list of them and submit to them in accordance to their T & C. Most directories would approve your listin if you follow their guidelines properly and you end up with a bunch of good free backlinks. To check for a good quality directory, remeber the following:

1. A good directory would never ask for a link back
2. Try to find how old the directory is — the older the better
3. Check the number of sites already submitted – the more the number of sites the better it is
4. Check if the site links to websites that are potetial bad neighborhoods.

b) Blog & Social Media: Create a blog of your own. Believe me it is far better than spamming other’s blogs In almost all SEO related websites it i preached that content is the key to success because search engines love content and good contents gain links. What better way would you have to present your good content to potential linkers than postin it in your blog? It is important that you create a blog as a part of your domain, i.e, if your domain is http://www.example.com/, you can have a blog as http://www.example.com/blog . This helps to transfer the power of the free back links that you get in your blog to the main domain also.

Create good content on your blog and submit them to the social media websites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit etc. If your content is really good, you are sure to get a host of Free back links. ( this reminds me, probably I should make my next post on what is “Good content”).

c)RSS Feeds: Generate a RSS feed and submit it to the RSS directories. On the Internet people are hungry for content, there might be a bunch of people waiting to put your RSS on their website and thus provide you with a bunch of free backlinks.

d) Article Marketing: Write short articles about your product / service / industry and submit it to the various article directories. These article directories would allow you to put your link in the article or in the author’s byline. The best part is in most of these cases you can link back to your site with your choice of anchor text and again its all for free

e) Press Release: We all know what press releases are meant for but an advantage that we should not overlook is that a press release would always contain a link back to the website. So a well circulated press release is equals to a bunch of Free back links.

f) Website Review: There are various websites and forums that conducts review of website/product/services. Submit your website to these and with each review you are sure to get atleast one free back link. ( Drawback: if your product/service quality is bad you might get some negative review which in turn can affect your business)

g)Freebies: For those webmasters who can afford or are technically very strong; offer free widgets, templates and other freebies that people can use on their website and blogs and ask them for a link in return. Most of them would happily link back to your website for a good free wordpress template or a fancy widget.

Do you still need more ways to get free backlinks ? Check This

Related Posts:
How To Build Free Back links with Google

The post Free Back Links ! – How to Get Links for Free? appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

In his article Jim has mentioned,

“As search users travel across linked pages, the search engines track how much time users spends on linked pages and the pathways they take when leaving a document.”

To my understanding, in order to track this information, Google or for that matter any search engine would need to track the visitor’s IP address and record the pages that are being accessed from that IP. They also need to record the time duration for which a particular website is being accessed in order to judge for how long a visitor is on that site.

They can do this only when they are installing a cookie or implementing some similar functioning technology that would track the activities on that particular machine and send that information to them.

If we consider that the search engines are implementing such a technology, aren’t they violating privacy rights ? are they allowed to track the user’s machine or IP address for that matter ?

I am pretty sure that most search engines claim that they do not violate the privacy rights and do not track activities on user’s PC without their consent.

Now, if we are to believe them, Jim’s comment in his article (as quoted above) does not hold water.

I have posted this question in one of the SEO forums, where most users have appreciated Jim’s article ( Jim is also a member in this forum and has visited the thread before) but till now I haven’t received any explanation about this from Jim or any other veteran members who have appreciated the articles. I also plan to mail the site that has published this article, in case I do, I will post the mail in this blog and if there is a reply from them.

In case any of you people feel that you have an explanation for this please feel free to shoot !

The post Search Engine’s Track Your Activities – Is That Possible Jim ? appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.