Clearing Up MYTHS And FACTS About SEO and Google

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

When you do and apply creativity you will find out there are LOTS of things that a web sit owner would want and then you pick what you can do to give it to them.

After doing some tests after our discussion, I have to agree with you more about the linkbait thing working in off-the-beaten IM/Tech trail. The neat thing is that not only do you get links but you get targeted referral traffic too. What I did probably wasn't quite the "give it to them" approach but it worked and made money. Thanks for the idea.

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by bgmacaw

The neat thing is that not only do you get links but you get targeted referral traffic too. What I did probably wasn't quite the "give it to them" approach but it worked and made money. Thanks for the idea.

Precisely because now your backlinks are not sitting in profiles that no one looks at (but that gives you juice). Really people are reading through articles with those kind of links and traffic comes your way as a result.

I dont want to give away any of my "secrets" but one of my first forays into linkbait (and it wasn't even full linkbait) was pretty basic with Wordpress themes (I know I've mentioned it before probably) . You can go over DP and buy them for $40 or so. You can hire another guy to change colors, image for a few bucks (if you don't know how to do it) and end up with three or four themes. Now you are completely justified in submitting them for inclusion in like a hundred different wordpress theme sites. So I ended up with a pile of High Pr backlinks (three to five or six)
and then to my surprise I had three thousand visitors looking for the file to download each month.

Plus as the owner I placed a designer link on the themes and sites that used the them gave me backlinks as well. The linkbait came in when other blogs that deal with themes mentioned my theme and directly linked back to my site. I didn't do it. they did.

Heres the kicker. I found you could target that to niche's. Poker players were looking for poker themes, People who wrote about Jewelry wanted jewelry themes. It wasn't just tech sites links. Another strategy I will mention for free is calculators. Webmasters love to link to tools even when they are simply. Simple calculators like risk calculators, cost and profit calculators etc get tons of backlinks. The links stay too. No fear of removal and competitors can't match those backlinks with automated tools.

Anyway glad my post helped.

[tro2]

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

I dont want to give away any of my "secrets" but one of my first forays into linkbait (and it wasn't even full linkbait) was pretty basic with Wordpress themes (I know I've mentioned it before probably) . You can go over DP and buy them for $40 or so. You can hire another guy to change colors, image for a few bucks (if you don't know how to do it) and end up with three or four themes. Now you are completely justified in submitting them for inclusion in like a hundred different wordpress theme sites. So I ended up with a pile of High Pr backlinks (three to five or six)
and then to my surprise I had three thousand visitors looking for the file to download each month.

Plus as the owner I placed a designer link on the themes and sites that used the them gave me backlinks as well.

I thought designer links in Wordpress themes are devalued by Google?

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

I dont want to give away any of my "secrets" but one of my first forays into linkbait (and it wasn't even full linkbait) was pretty basic with Wordpress themes (I know I've mentioned it before probably) .

As you can tell from my sig, that is something I do already do and it has been effective.

There are a few other things I've tried recently that have been more along the lines of creating mystery/controversy that have done well. Forums can be a great springboard for these.

Originally Posted by tro2

I thought designer links in Wordpress themes are devalued by Google?

Footer links aren't contextual links and may not match the content of the site. Sitewide links are averaged out across all of the pages. This makes them of less value but they still count to some degree.

[semeasy]

Originally Posted by petelta

I'm still not sold on your Link Wheel theory. I have heard many horror stories of link wheels but I have been testing them out a lot lately.

I have one mini site (4 pages) and all I have done to backlink is link wheels. Both open and closed. It's number 4 right now of a competitive keyword.

Something negatives going to have to happen before I'm a believer.

Travis

I agree... Google looks at most things on the web as a link wheel, whether you manually create them or not...

I have had GREAT successes with them...

But great post!

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by bgmacaw

As you can tell from my sig, that is something I do already do and it has been effective.

LOL. Bgmacaw I didn't even look at your sig. I was preaching to the choir the whole time. Kudos though. I haven't seen many people utilize such powerful techniques in IM. Simply because it s not a push button and get X amount of links strategy.

[birdfood]

Interesting points about duplicate content.

There are many posts on this forum about duplicate content and the consensus seemed to be from the experts that it is not harmful.

[wsmith1213]

great info, thank you!

[Dan B Rusu]

Mark, besides WP themes, how could you do link bait for offline work. Say you have a client "Miami dentist" with the standard business site. Is there any linkbait methods you can do for them?

Have you considered writting a wso? you've already got a customer.

[Dan B Rusu]

For Mike Anthony and bgmacaw,

It seems that many people that download your free wp theme would simply erase your link from the theme

i.e. - erase "Theme Provided By ..."

Is that what you've found happens? If so, what percentage of people would you say download the theme?

And how many downloads of your theme, which lead to backlinks, can you expect to see over 3 months for a well designed theme in a hot market submitted to all the major free theme sites?

Also - it also seems to me that people that download these themes would be using them for new sites - so PR0. Are these links worthwhile then?

Wow alot more questions than I thought I had.

[wsmith1213]

question about blog links. A lot of my real estate sites use the same keywords, If i write a blog post, how many of them and how many times can I mention the url without getting sandboxed?

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by Daniel7rusu

It seems that many people that download your free wp theme would simply erase your link from the theme

Some people do that or else make the link nofollow. Basically, you can't spend your time worrying about that.

Originally Posted by Daniel7rusu

And how many downloads of your theme, which lead to backlinks, can you expect to see over 3 months for a well designed theme in a hot market submitted to all the major free theme sites?

I don't worry about counting links, especially in the short term. I'd estimate it's around 5000 to 10,000 over about a year's time.

Originally Posted by Daniel7rusu

Also - it also seems to me that people that download these themes would be using them for new sites - so PR0. Are these links worthwhile then?

Yes. Don't obsess about PR. Remember these are sitewide footer links that won't have as much value as a contextual link. Not all of the links will be counted, only an average across the site. However, these links give you a lot of IP address diversity and can increase in value should a site using it gain authority status.

[jazbo]

"Using more than 2 links all up in one blog post will hurt the site and will not credit the backlinks to your site from that post... THAT IS ALSO TRUE... BUT, it only hurts the site if you use more than 3 links and it actually seems to hurt the actual site you are linking to!"

Not sure I understand this one, but I am thinking its related to this: if you have mutliple links on a page going to the same URL, google ignores all links after the first to a single page. So if you have two links to a page and the second on the page is your anchor text link, you may want to look at changing it so you get your best anchor text as the first link to a URL on the page.

[keivn2]

Great stuff to read. It is really enlighten me of what should I do and not.

Write a brand new article, pay someone else to do it, use a good spinner or at least rewrite the 1st and last paragraphs of your article before reposting it if you ABSOLUTELY MUST... but i don't really recommend it if you are planning to put that on your own site, but i dare say you will get away with this on most Web 2.0 Sites.

For article submission, should I re-write the resource box as well?