Running a Linking Campaign

Let's mention article directories straight up for capturing links to your site

The following article is one I prepared for distribution to article directories. The directories publish your articles. For a short time you will likely get credit in search engines for them, but then the directory often moves them off their "new article" page - which often has a pr of 6 or 7 - and moves it way down the PR link chain into no mans land.

However, in no man's land, your article may get picked up by another web site that wishes to provide related content for their readers - to keep their readers coming back or minimize the risk of them leaving to try and find the information.

This is where you may start to pick up more permanent link juice (PR), as it is normally a requirement of the directory, that the website publishing your article on their site must include the links back to YOUR site that you embedded in your author section of your article.

Obviously, for this to work well, you want to produce good looking and interesting articles!

Anyway, here is my article on running a linking campaign:

Title: Running a linking campaign?

Author: By Donald Urquhart

Overview or Summary : OK, we all need to run linking campaigns unless we have been around since dot and are already established. I still see people making the same linking errors over and over again – linking errors that can cost them big time in the long run.

Body: Running a linking campaign is probably one of the most important aspects of running a website.

Websites seldom get to the top of the pile by the virtue of other web masters generosity – mostly you'll be seen as competition and ignored.

So some bad things you'll consider as you become more and more desperate to have your web site known are:

Paid links – Yes you can go to high powered paid directories, financially support organisations for that valuable one way link back for being their sponsor. Buying links in other words, but being a bit smarter about it. Yes, you will get a boost in your PR by doing this.

Still the down side, is that you believe search engines like Google to be stupid. Do you honestly believe that a company bent on making profits, a company that has arguably the greatest computer power in the world, isn't going to see you? Do you really believe they don't know about paid links from these sites? Eventually, the penalties should roll, and your time and effort will then be just a waste. Lets face it, if I know about the site that demands $1000 US contributions each year to get listed on their PR8 page, then so does Google. Google is too big not to know. Matter of fact, you probably used Google or another search engine to find the site in the first place !

3 way linking, 4 way linking – another of the black hat techniques aimed at gaining unfair link weighting in the search engines. Again, the premise seems to be that Google and other companies are too stupid to realise. You may ask, but how will they know? Simply answered, they have the money, the computer power and the expertise to know. Again, sooner or later, you are going to be caught I suspect, and all your time and money are then history – along with your website most probably.

Directories of webmasters who want to link, is another idea that will come to you - to join up with a number of websites that say they will put you in contact with other web site owners who are desperate to link. An absolutely brilliant idea, but, the desperate web masters often, I've found more times than not, will cheat you on your link back. It's actually quite easy for them to do that – a no follow command, a .htaccess command, robot command, java scripting it are just four ways that come to mind in as many seconds.

You will also think that only sites with better PR are worth linking with, because that's where your PR will be best gained. That's actually partly true, but the downside is, why would they link to yours if they had the same opinion as you? In fact, I hired a link manager for my hemorrhoid treatment site, and one of the things he told me was to take reciprocal links with any health site of any PR value, as although many may pass into the oblivion of nonexistence as their web masters realise their dreams are not being achieved, there will however be a few that will remain and grow strong, and as they grow strong, so does the PR of the link back.

Avoid spammy sites and sites just made for links of course – human edited directories are OK to get a link from, but FFA – link farms, where you just throw your link in and it's there, have zilch value and wastes your time.

So, to have a good chance at long term success, have good content to attract one way links from people who are impressed by it, and foster reciprocal links responsibly.

About the Author:

Donald runs several popular websites with an attached <a href=”http://www.cholesterolcholestrol.com/cholesterol_and_health_web_portal/resources.html”> reciprocal link directory </a> for health related web sites, and another <a href=”http://www.hemorrhoidshemroids.com/hemorrhoidshemroidsresources/index.html”> add url directory </a> here. <a href=”http://www.hemorrhoidshemroids.com”> Hemorrhoid Treatments </a> is one of his major interests

Results of Running my articles in article directories.

I published a mixed set of 10 articles about a year ago in one article directory. Each article to date has been published between 1 and 4 times. Average around 2 times. This means that I have gained links back from about two websites for every article I published.

One article only got taken up by one web site, one got taken up by 4 web sites, the rest were 2's and 3's.

What I gleaned from this, was that there is often over a 1,000 articles covering your exact topic in that article directory, so don't expect to move mountains with article directories any more for the popular topics, but anything is better than nothing, and you can always submit your articles to other article directories as well.

Why Link at all?

Good question. In the old days of the internet, when I set up my first site, the idea of links was simply a service for readers. You knew your topic, that's why it was on the internet, you also knew the other web sites that were similar to yours, or relevant to yours. It made sense in those days to have a links page.

Depending on your site of course, you could expect around 10% of your traffic to come from such link pages.

Then some bright spark, with a nare a thought for the consequences apparently, persuaded Google to give value to those links. Once they had value, that was the end of the nice link pages for the most part.

Links came to be viewed as valuable commodities that could be bought and sold on sites to increase search engine positioning.

The vast majority of linking today is for PR, not to provide the good old service to readers.

Some, like me, try to meld the two together, but link cheats make life hard for everyone.

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Our Health Care Resources Portal contains my original articles on varied health issues, plus relevant links. Our old link pages, are just that, link pages: Hemroids links and Health Resources 1 & Health Resources 2 & Health Resources 3 & Health Resources 4 to other hemroid related or health related sites.