It used to be so easy, even if it didn't seem like it at the time. If your business couldn't afford the big budget banner ads on huge portals, to generate links you signed up for an link exchange (which was usually a portal of sorts), webring, and got your site registered on as many directories and search engines as the freebie registration sites could muster. Then started exchanging links.
You did a little research to find complementary services, and sent those sites a letter asking for a link on their site if you'd put one on yours. This was often the fun part.
Because one of the common rules was that 70% of the purchases were from companies and sites that were physically within 70 miles of your company, it became a sort of social program. You had a reason to meet all sorts of people near you!
You exchanged links with them, and made new friends.
While that rule still applies, more and more buyers are willing to purchase from anywhere off the Net. Some significant percentage of buyers only purchase locally still.
You worked this guerrilla style until you made enough money to buy a big banner ad. And usually by then it wasn't traffic and links you were after, it was "transactional visitors", or .. buyers.
Anyway, that's enough of the lament.
Things still work that way. Sorta.
Developments
In the great hunt for links, an changed link with complementary business sites are invaluable but webrings and link exchanges have fallen into disfavor. There is a great debate going on that could cause a lot of change to the Web economy. Not just for webrings and link exchanges, but all affiliate programs.
Affiliate programs traditionally work one of two ways:
- The affiliate network places your ad on either targeted or non-specific sites that are also members of the network that go through their server then are redirected to your site;
- or you set up your own affiliate program, called a "network specific linking network".
If you run your own affiliate network though, you end up with many links to your site - and have to pay your own commissions. It's just harder because you have to administer your own program.
Newer Affiliate Networks
Newer affiliate networks have software, called an "affiliate management" application, that you install on your server to direct the click-through to your site. The program is often sold as much on this capability as on the number of links the network can provide. But if the company doesn't emphasize how their network works, ask. And ask your SEO people to watch for these networks. They can usually tell just by checking the links to the affiliate servers and a couple of their clients.
Google in its infinite wisdom has become aware of repititious wording in links. Google watches how quickly links to a site accumulate in order to avoid search engine spam. Since you submit an ad to a link exchange, often for a fee, the same ad ends up repeated all over the Net. If too many links appear in a short time, Google may penalize or even ban your site.
Google has even gone so far as to make a patent filing.
Google now watches to see if too many links appear with identical anchor text, then checks to see if the links disappear quickly. Affiliate networks are automated inserted text and code which expose your link with others in a round table fashion. If you were to join an affiliate network, the number of links to your site would increase dramatically. But the links will appear, then disappear, from a site within a few minutes.
Since Google is doing this sort of thing, you can expect other search engines to adopt the same practice soon.
Complementary business sites
Sending out requests for links is one of the fundamental functions of marketing on the Net. Will this sort of activity trigger Google's anti-spamming defenses? Search engine marketers will have to be careful of the anchor text.
Another consideration is how stringently Google will enforce its rules against linking to banned sites. If another site in the affiliate network has been identified as using spamming tactics, you don't want a link to or from that site. But how will you - as the owner of a site - or your marketing agenty know?
There is a list of banned sites, of course. It's huge. But that is part of the reason you would hire an agent: to make the right decisions for you.
Interesting bit
This was an interesting thing to find. Recently, when one of my clients was setting up her new site and blog, she accidentally entered her site name into the search window. She entered "www.potsandpans.com". (not her site)
What came back was a surprise. There were 14 links to her site! - But her site wasn't finished and had not been submitted to any directories or search engines. In fact, the link to her domain only showed a non-functional page.
Checking later, there were only 4, then 5 links to her site in the same search.
All of the sites appeared to be different, but they contained the same segment of text from her blog, which included anchor text: "..only quality pots and pans are what we want .." (This is only an example. If it actually is a live link, it's an accident.)
It turned out that someone had set up a number of domains about kitchenware, kitchens, and pots, and pointed them to blogs. The made up pages which only contained a Google Adsense ad, and a little nonsense text.
Every link that showed had been modified as if it were generated by PHP. For example, instead of "http://www.kittykitchens.com", the linked page was "http://www.kittykitchens.com/?goop=nonsense". That last bit might be used to track a session.
If you've ever wondered what happens when a page is generated by a content management program, that's it. The server makes an identical page on the server. The page is called "http://www.kittykitchens.com/?goop=nonsense", but it's only there for a short while.
That's how she found 14 links, and later there were only 4, then 5.
There were literally hundreds of these blogs, with about 70 pages on each. The software just looped through the sites - There were at least 85 of them at my count. - and tried to generate a fake page for every page. (at least 85 X 70 = 5950!)
This was automated blog spamming in a big way!
No wonder Google has become concerned.
Link Quality, not Quantity
Not many people think about it, but many ads on a webpage dilute the relevancy of the content. In the example above, because the webpages contained only random snippets other than the Google ads, there was no relevant content other than the snippet injected into the page to generate the link!
The old days system couldn't help but produce relevant links since there weren't so many ways to produce irrelevant links.
Webrings are usually targeted within an industry or interest. But you don't hear much about webrings any more.
Affiliate networks are still a good source of links, there's no reason to bail out of them just yet. Like all things in business, you just have to know what you're dealing with and steer clear of the dangerous stuff.
Industry effects
Google will find some resistance in being too stringent about these new rules since Ad Words and AdSense are simply a new way of working affiliate networks in the final analysis. The same can be argued for all PPC (pay per click) services.
Google may find itself having to explain why it is trying to run the only affiliate network on the Net.
If the stuff in this blog makes sense to you, visit my website at AEmeritus Relevant Training because that's where it's all gonna be put in motion.
Just a raw plug for my first SEO clients:
Short Cut Computers belongs to Steve Trim, a friend who actually paid me to learn this stuff and put it to work for him.
And Steve Trim's other business, Barcode Solutions., which will be my second project. Sphere: Related Content
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