Since the post I have been inundated with lots of questions and have decided to break down Google as best as I can in order to clear up a lot of misconceptions and point you all down the correct path.
The most asked question had to do with my assertion that two-way backlinks should be avoided.
One of my readers left this comment;
Cheryl said...
Is this really true about two-way backlinks not being valuable? I'm a newbie at this SEO thing and there's people who say that this is a no-no and others who claim there is no such thing as giving away link juice.
In LOOOOOVE with your blog BTW!
First off Cheryl... I'm in LOOOOOOVE with people like you who leave such nice comments. Thank you - you made my day for that.
As to your question - there is disagreement over two-way links because each of us has a different priority with regards to backlinks. I should have clarified this from the outset.
Two-way backlinks can bring you traffic. If we exchange links then some of my readers will visit your site and some of your readers will visit my site. This is all good... if you already have Page Rank and are only concerned with increasing traffic from like minded sites. If you took the time and collected hundreds of these type of links then you might get a decent amount of traffic to your site.
The thing is though, achieving a high page rank from Google will always get you more traffic than exchanging two-way links. If you want to attain a high page rank then the single best way to do this is with one-way links. Google is not stupid - in fact the brains behind the Google algorithms are among the sharpest people in the business and they look at backlinks in a very pragmatic way. If all your links are two-way the thinking is as follows;
- if your links are from related sites only, Google will give you some credit and not penalize you. They will know however that you got the link by asking for it and this means that it is not a natural link brought about because your site is seen as an important resource in your niche. In short a two-way link to a related site doesn't tell Google that you are special.
- if your links are from unrelated sites then Google will penalize you. The thinking is that if your "Dog Grooming" site is getting links from "Casino" sites and "real Estate" sites then you have joined a link exchange program and your links are not only un-natural but you are pointing your readers to sites that have nothing to do with the subject matter that brought them to you in the first place.
Always remember that Google is the top search engine for a reason - they are concerned about providing the best results available for any search term. People will stop using them if searches don't provide the info people are looking for.
If a site on "Dog Grooming" has thousands of two-way links to it and Google didn't care how good the links were, the site would reach the number 1 position in the SERP's. The problem is that this site might have very little info on it for people looking to groom their dog. Until the last Google Slap this is exactly what was happening in the search results. People (yes I am guilty as well) who knew how to set up adsense spam sites with tons of links to it were beginning to dominate all the top search positions. This had Google in a flap - both Google and myself were making a killing from the adsense clicks that resulted when someone showed up at my Dog grooming site. My site had no usable info on it yet it ranked number 1 because I had hundreds of two-way links to it. The reader would notice the adsense ads which did appear to offer the info they were looking for and presto... they would click and Google and myself made money. The problem for Google was this - while they made a ton of money from this they realized that this would be short lived as people would stop using them if the search results didn't improve. In the end Google Slapped the hell out of all the adsense sites by changing the Algorithm so that only one-way links from related sites would gain you page rank. The higher the page rank of the linking site the higher your page rank would become.
If you think about it this new system does make a lot of sense.
If your Dog Grooming site has only 4 backlinks and my site has 1000 backlinks, who should rank higher in the SERP's?
You might think the site with 1000 backlinks.
What if your 4 backlinks were all one-way and from 4 PR5 sites that have been around a long time and are all Dog Grooming sites. What if my 1000 links were all two-way and from sites that were brand new and few if any had anything to do with dog grooming.
Knowing this you can now see why Google would rank the site with only 4 very natural and high quality links much higher in the SERP's than the site with a 1000 poor quality links. The searcher is far more likely to find the answers they are looking for from your site than mine.
The only reason 4 high PR sites would link to you is because they feel you have something to offer or you paid them for the links. (More on this shortly)
Any crappy site can get a 1000 two-way backlinks. Only a legitimate site can get high PR one-way backlinks.
Paid Backlinks
After the Google Slap all of us with adsense sites quickly saw our money evaporate and a lot of the spammers got out of the business. The smart ones didn't give up so easily though. If Google wanted quality one-way backlinks then so be it. In fact the Google slap did us a favour - it got rid of all our competition and allowed those of us left to really dominate the SERP's. How? Simple - we went out and found all the relevant "real" sites with high page rank and offered these sites money to put a one-way link on their site pointing to our sites. Sure this cost a few bucks but what the heck, we were back in business and making even more money than before since 80% of our former competition was gone.
Ooops... said Google. They fixed one problem and suddenly a new one surfaced. Damn spammers.
To correct this Google is now talking of penalizing paid links. This is the buzz at the moment and has people in a new uproar. While this makes perfect sense from Googles point of view, the word on the street is that they will have a hard time pulling this off. How do they know what links are paid for and which links are natural without having a human being check out every site to see if it is a spam site - either giving the link or getting the link? Of course sites with hundreds or thousands of out going links will be easy to spot as likely paid links.
If they penalize people for having static links (side panel links and banner ads) then they will hurt a lot of legitimate affiliate sites in the process. The consensus seems to be that instead of penalizing them these links just won't count as high as one-way links that are seen to be the most natural, links which are one-way links contained in articles or other informational text posted on a page.
This is what I meant in my last post when I said that there is a "Perfect Link".
A perfect link is one that is part of the text on a page, on a site that has both high Page Rank and has been around a year or longer and the linking anchor text (wording in the link) is perfectly optimized for your sites keywords.
A link like this is seen and rightly so, as most likely being natural and offering the reader valuable information. Why would an older established site with a PR5 write an article on some subject and include a link in the text to your site unless they felt their readers could benefit from you. OK... true I could pay them but most sites like this have credibility - they aren't spam sites - and they actually do care about the info they supply their readers. It's one thing to get them to put up a banner or static advertiser link as they know that their readers don't hold them accountable for ads. It's another thing to get them to post a link to a spam site in the middle of an article on a topic their readers have come to read for information. Needless to say the readers will be upset at this and therefore, the site is not likely to take your money for a paid article link.
The end result is that Google sees these types of links as being the least corrupted and will reward you most for them.
How to get the Perfect BackLink?
The last post explained this so I will just quickly recap.
Articles, articles and more articles. And make sure they are unique articles. You write articles with your embedded anchor text link in it and other sites like what they see, feel their readers will find the article useful and they will post it on their site. Simple.
Well almost... You won't get many PR4 and up sites posting your articles. Why? They usually write their own stuff. You will get lesser PR sites posting your links though and this will get you some PR. What you are really hoping for is that you get 1 high PR site to link to you. This 1 site can boost your PR a lot provided you aren't being penalized for other infractions like too many two-way backlinks or paid one-way links or links coming from a link farm or links from irrelevant sites.
The Google Silver Lining
Since a lot of you are new at this I know that most of you are thinking that getting perfect links is going to be hard to achieve - yes they will. The thing is you only need a few of them to make a difference. I mentioned in the last post that I have written about 2 dozen articles linking to this blog. From people who have downloaded my articles I have about 700 links accrued over the last six months - the age of this blog. Most of the links are from new sites with no page rank and are sitting in the Google Sandbox. 20 links are from sites with PR and I have 2 PR7 links, 1 PR6 link, 1 PR5 link and 3 PR4 links. These are all I need and they will do more for me than the other 693 links combined and I got them by writing articles. Nothing more.
Ok... I know, I know. You hate writing, you're no good at it, you don't have the time. You really want me to tell you how you can achieve PR without writing. I have bad news for you. You can't unless you are willing to spend money having people like me do your writing for you. You can use Private Label Rights (PLR) and free articles instead of unique content but not for your main site or blog. (More on this below).
If you are trying to create a prosperous online business with your own website or blog you need unique content to do it. The only content that Google sees is good old html text or in simple terms the words you are currently reading. If you can't or won't write and/or don't want to pay for it, then I suggest you concentrate on affiliate marketing with PPC and stay away from creating your own sites. (You will still need to write good ad copy though)
I realize that most of you don't want to hear this. The ability to write or lack thereof is the single biggest factor in how successful your website or blog will be. Face it, you only read stuff online if it is well written and informative. If a site has everything you need but is poorly written and ugly you won't stick around long - you will find a site that appeals to you. Graphics and layout might please you but poor writing will turn you off in a hurry. You won't care if a site has a terrible layout if the writing is great. As big and complex as the cyberworld is - it all still comes down to just two things; Eyeballs and the written word. (OK Video is becoming huge but dialogue still has to be written)
Websites need unique well written copy to succeed.
Articles have to be well written or no one will post them.
Affiliate marketing requires exceptionally well written sales pages and adwords copy to succeed.
It doesn't matter what niche or market you are after on the net - to succeed you will need well written copy of one kind or another. You can become a spammer and try and make a living but I can assure you that this road is always short lived and you work your ass off.
I mentioned a Google Silver Lining and here it is. If you do what Google wants you to do then they will reward you for it. While not confirmed (Gurus Cody Moya and Matt Garrett feel it is valid) it is now believed that Google will award you with a PR4 ranking if you meet certain criteria. I have found this too be true from my own sites so I tend to think it must be true. Here it is...
If your site is old enough (6 months to a year or older) and you have at least one hundred pages of content then you will get a PR4 ranking. This is only if you haven't done something to piss Google off and been penalized for it. I have found that this works for both my original content blogs and my PLR blogs. I will explain the difference.
I have been experimenting with blogs that are 100% white hat and blogs that use a lot of black/grey hat techniques to see how well they climb the Google ladder. The blog you are reading is one of my white hat blogs. With this blog I have about 140 pages of unique content. I have a second IM blog much like this one - same age and subject matter - but it has 200 plus pages of duplicate content or snippets as they are known. Simply put it is the type of blog that has several paragraphs of snippets posted on each page that link back to the original sources. I don't do any writing for the second blog - just RSStoBlog all the posts. (You non-writers can do this as well).
So far the two blogs are equal as far as Google is concerned regarding Page Rank - both are PR2 at the moment. When the next Google page rank update occurs (every three months - last was end of April/early May) I will find out if they make it to PR4.
The difference in the two blogs is this. This blog has a lot of good backlinks - the second blog doesn't have any good backlinks at all.
This blog has a decent subscriber list. The second blog has none.
This blog makes very little money - hardly any adsense revenue and as one reader pointed out - hardly any affiliate sales either as I seem to keep giving away stuff for free to those that ask. The second blog is making decent money from both adsense and affiliate sales.
This blog has decent google traffic and lots of return visitors. The second blog gets no free traffic to speak of and no return visitors.
This blog has cost me nothing and the second blog has PPC fees every month.
This blog ranks high in the SERP's for a lot of my keywords - the second blog doesn't rank well for anything.
So which is better. Depends really. If I was after money quickly then the second blog is better. In the long run I will make more money from this one as it has the proper base to grow with. The second blog is really just the new way to create a spam blog that slips past Google's rules. It isn't really spam as it does have good content on it - just not my own unique content. Like a spam blog it is set up to get the reader to click away from it - either to an affiliate page or on the adsense ads. Because it has good content though it doesn't get flamed as a spam site.
The Duplicate Content Penalty
The Duplicate Content "penalty" is largely misunderstood by webmasters.
First of all Google will penalize duplicate content within the same site, to make
sure that only one copy of a page is shown.
Where Google finds content that is essentially the same on different sites, the
version with the higher "authority" (pagerank) will be shown in the SERP's and the other page(s) may end up in the supplemental results, but they will not receive a PR penalty. This is because doing so would penalize a lot of major publications like the New York Times et al who all use duplicate content that they pull from the wire services. Google can't call the New York Times a spammer and doesn't want to - they only want to get rid of the junk - not content that is useful, duplicate or not.
So using PLR or free articles is ok, although I would recommend using unique content on the home page of your website and only unique content for your main blog.
I also believe it is worth creating new "Title" and "Description" Meta Tags on the article pages, as well as changing the title of the article. This can help to get clicks in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) if people do find your site, but again it is not strictly necessary.
If either of my two IM blogs makes PR4 then I will simply link the higher one to the lower one. If both achieve PR4 I won't link them at all. I will use both as the anchor sites for complete blog empires that will target long tail keywords - each blog will focus on one keyword each.
This has been a long winded answer to Cheryl's question but I hope it clears up some of the confusion regarding Google and it's rules when it comes to backlinks.
While I'm on topic I thought I might give you a few more pointers, especially for those of you just starting out. I have laid out the proper way to set up a blog in previous posts so I will skip this and get right to the next step.
When starting out I suggest you concentrate on one blog only and allow yourself 6 months to get it to a PR4. Do this by creating 100 or so unique pages of content on your blog and if possible create another 20 or so articles for submission to article submission sights.
If you do nothing else I guarantee that this along with my SEO tips (previous posts) will get your site indexed fast and give you a PR4 at the end of the six months. Don't worry if you have no traffic and aren't making any money with this method - once you have a PR4 you will start making money. There are many reasons for this and I will get into more details in my next post. Just know that a PR4 site is very useful for making money in many ways; you can sell backlinks for one thing, you can use it to get all your other blogs ranked high or you can sell your site for some decent money. These are but a few examples but the key to an online business is getting that first site on top of the charts and using it to grow the rest of your empire. Six months may seem a long time to wait but it is well worth it in the long run.
Some Black Hat Tips
Some of you (actually a lot of you) keep asking about Black hat techniques. I would be a hypocrite to tell you to avoid these techniques as I use a lot of black hat tricks myself. What I will tell you is to stay away from anything that can get your main site penalized. You can experiment with other sites until you master what you are doing.
Rule number 1 - until you know what you are doing never black hat a site that you have Google Adsense ads on. You do not want Google to ban you. This will take away the easiest source of income on the net.
Rule number 2 - don't black hat a site that has a good PR. It's not worth losing your PR to save a little time.
Rule number 3 - refer to the first two rules. Always weight the downside against the upside before you do anything.
Ok. I am not going to tell you how to use software to create hundreds of spam blogs full of machine created content. Yes this is done all the time but most people doing it don't have a clue and end up banned. One day I will detail how this is done properly but for now stay away from this.
The type of black hat that I use most often is more refined in nature.
For example.
One of the reasons I started this blog was to piss off a lot of the Gurus and wannabees who dominate the Internet Marketing niche. Why? Hell why not.
To this end I have targeted the "Greatest, latest must have product of the month" crowd. I'm sure you know what I mean. Every month we see a launch for some "program" that the Gurus assure us we can't live without. Without question this stuff is aimed at newbies and equally without question these programs are outright crap or at best are to advanced for beginners to gain anything from. A lot of it is just rehashed ebooks with new titles and labels. Mostly it just makes me gag and I just want to make their lives (Gurus) a bit more difficult.
How do you make it more difficult for them to sell crap to beginners? Easy. I target every new product (that is popular, meaning Guru driven) with a review. So what you say, there are lots of review sites out there. This is true but let me ask you - how many reviews do you read that are real reviews and not just affiliates selling the product under the guise of a review. Not many.
Pay attention - Google likes review sites. Google likes Blogs. Google really likes blogs that have reviews. People looking to buy stuff like reading reviews of the stuff before buying. It only takes one well written negative review to convince someone not to buy a product. How many affiliate reviews endorsing a product do you read before deciding to buy? Probably a few, in fact you aren't looking for an endorsement - you are looking to see if there are any negative reviews. If there aren't any then you will likely buy the product and the endorsement reviews won't sway you much. Human nature 101... if nothing bad has been said about something then it must be good. Right?
And now here is a tip you probably don't know. The first page of the SERP's list all the most relevant sites for a particular query. Most people assume that everything else being equal the highest PR site will get top spot and then each spot for the rest of the top 10 will descend in order of PR.
If you Google the following query, "Roadmap to Riches Review" you will see a list of sites offering reviews of this new program.
Of the 10 sites, you will notice that most are affiliate sites with fake reviews but there is always 1 site with a negative review on the first page (if a negative review exists) and it makes the front page regardless of its PR. You will also usually find a site selling something related to the review product, again regardless of PR - normally some book from Amazon. You will also notice that one of the sites might be an alternate media site (a video site like youtube) which again makes the front page without any PR. You will find page 2 and 3 of the SERP's loaded with much higher PR sites than the 2 or 3 sites I just outlined that make page 1. Why?
The reason is that Google wants the person who is doing the search to have as many options as possible concerning their query. The person asked for a review of a product. Would Google be providing the reader with all the facts if they only listed the top ten PR sites who all happen to be in favour of the product. Maybe the reader wants a negative opinion as well. Google gives them the highest PR negative opinion on page one as well as the highest PR favorable opinion. They also give the reader the option of seeing a video if available as well as the option to view a similar product to the one queried. Because of Googles algorithm you can get a low PR site on page one right beside the high PR sites and ahead of lots of other sites that outrank you by simply being one of the options Google wants to provide the searcher.
In the example query "Roadmap to Riches Review" this blog sat in position 3 on page 1 for the past week or so until today when a negative review on Digg booted me off the page. I sat there for a week in spite of my low PR surrounded by and ahead of sites with a much higher PR.
Being bounced by Digg is OK with me... the posting on Digg is for my blog article that Digg bounced in the first place. Actually this is better because I am still getting the same traffc I was but now I have a high PR site like Digg giving me a backlink.
The end result is that I know my negative review of Roadmap to Riches has thwarted a few sales ( read the review - I really hate 2-up schemes as they prey on newbies more than any other kind of program ) and I created lots of traffic to my site in the process.
and now the black hat part...
Because this program is popular I had a lot of negative review competitors to beat out for that spot on page 1. I did this with a little trick and using some other sites I own. First I linked a couple of PR3 sites to my post to give the page some credibility and then I keyword stuffed this blog page.
A few days back I listed all the keywords that people have used that culminated with them finding my site. I put this all together at the bottom of my page and waited for the Google Bot. Once my page was indexed by Google I removed all the keywords and waited for what years of experimenting told me would happen.
The next day I received the most visitors ever and made the most adsense revenue since I started this blog.
The reason is simple. Google will look at your page and figure out what it thinks you are about based on your keywords. A normal page using our example above would use the term Roadmap to Riches as the main keyword and will get traffic from people searching for that specific term. They won't rank as high for a misspelled term or for any other version of the query like Road Map to Riches or Road to Rich etc. A site that has every misspelling and every variation or at least lots of variations will get traffic from everybody and not just the people who typed in the correct phrase.
Once indexed I started getting tons of traffic because Google figured I was not only a negative review site in a sea of affiliate sites but I also had so many variations of the main keyword that my site just had to have something for everyone searching for Roadmap to Riches info. Bang I was in position 3 on page 1 overnight.
My adsense revenue increased partly because of the increase in visitors but mostly because the searcher couldn't find what they were looking for. People who found me using "ROADMAP TO RICHES +FORUM" quickly found out that I wasn't a forum but my adsense ads were full of Roadmap to Riches ads that they clicked on hoping to find what they were looking for in the first place. The fact that I had removed the stuffed keyword text by the time they found my site would have left them baffled as to why Google would index me for their particular search as none of the keywords remained on my pages.
This is black hatting. I only did it to show you how black hatters can manipulate Google and make money in the process. Before you try this let me warn you about a few things.
Google can usually tell when a site is stuffed with keywords and will penalize you for it. If you use a keyword more than 3 0r 4 times for every 100 words of text then you are seen as stuffing.
Normally I would never do something like this on a white hat blog like this. I do this to niche sites all the time. If my site is about Black Labrador Dogs and I see that cocker spaniels are suddenly getting lots of searches I will stuff my Black Lab page full of cocker spaniel keywords ( surrounded by tons of other text ), wait until google indexes me and then delete all the spaniel references except the Title and a few well placed keywords. Along come some visitors who can't find what they were looking for who then click the adsense ads which are showing cocker spaniel ads and voila - instant money.
Note: Your post title is the single biggest determining factor in what ads google places on your site. If it can't get a good idea of what your post is really about then it will use the keywords in your title. This is why you have different ads on different pages of the same blog. The ads are not blog specific - they are page specific.
To get the cocker spaniel ads I just call the post "Cocker Spaniels" and then proceed to talk about Black Labs for the rest of the post except to throw the Cocker Spaniel keyword into the first paragraph and the last sentence of the post. I also make sure not to use any other defining keywords more than once or twice. I don't want google to know what the page is about so that they give me ads based on my title.
I am not saying that the post is unreadable - it is - I never use content generated by machines. If a snooping Google employee was to read my post they would see a perfectly fine post about why I like Black Labs more than I like Cocker Spaniels. I just happened to optimize the post for Cocker Spaniels when I should have used Black Labs more in my keyword selection. A reader would not see a spam post, just a post that they thought was going to talk about Cocker Spaniels and does a little but not enough to satisfy their interest... wait look, this adsense ad might just be the ticket.
And that is how black hatting is done tactfully.
I am not suggesting that any of you should go down this path but I know a lot of you will try and I just don't want you to make the kinds of mistakes that will get you banned.
Ok this post is getting a little long even for me. That said I will return next time with some more tips of the trade and what ever else strikes my fancy. If you have specific questions - don't be shy, post a comment or send me an email.
Thanks for reading... you are a diehard to get through all of this.
Cheers,
Griz
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