Fly low under the radar and create randomness on purpose. There! Now you have the secret of SEO. 🙂
Good article by Mike Grehan – What Keeps Search Engines Awake at Night?
If you attend a conference and Mike Grehan is on the panel – attend the session. He is always entertaining and hates PR more than I do, and I didn’t think that was possible. I still don’t get why people get so hung up on PR. There are SO many other things to look at when you view a site. Good quality links are hard to find. Period. You usually need to look beyond PR to find them, and if you only have links coming in from high PR sites – well, that’s not very random is it!
Unfortunately, it’s unlikely you will find these quality links in your inbox. There are hidden gems and good sites that request links. But, it’s a painful process. You open up link exchange after link exchange where you just want to scream. In fact, there are days when I place link exchange emails right there next to the spam that I delete once a day. In fact, I often find a few link exchange requests in the spam folder, right where they belong – aren’t computers smart?
I usually try to write back and politely say no thanks so they will remove our site from their list. I actually got a nice reply back today that asked me if I would share with them why so they can improve their site. Their links page was spidered in Google. That’s the first thing I check. However, the title said ‘New Page 1’. I’m not sure how much traffic my site is going to get from that, and I actually stopped right there. But I wanted to write back with more than that – so I checked to see who was linking to them in Yahoo. That’s usually the second thing I check if I make it that far. There were several sites that all sounded the same, their titles and descriptions were the same, and they were all linking to this site. A little duplicative content web ring going there. Enough said!
There’s a tool I use to quickly do this – it’s a FireFox extension and I have found it a great time saver. http://www.quirk.co.za/searchstatus/
