Of course if it’s not easy to contact the owners of the sites linking to yours, then it might not be worth the time invested. On the Google Webmaster Central blog, they suggests that efforts be made towards having links removed; however, if there are sites less than desirable linking to yours, Google does offer some reassurance by stating that they have 200 factors when it comes to determining relevancy in the search results. I don’t recommend investing time towards contacting site owners requesting the removal of links. Instead, I suggest investing time towards increasing the number of higher quality links pointing to your site.

Controllable things are another thing that should be taken into consideration. Once again, Google points focus on their design, content, technical, and quality guidelines. Google implies that they understand that certain things fall outside your control. With that, explain that emphasis is given things that webmasters can control such as having a well maintained site with high quality and original content with an excellent linking structure. And I agree. I can’t think of a single popular site that I would consider to be a terrible site. I am sure they exist, and I am sure you can leave a comment pointing me to a few; but all in all, in my opinion, all popular sites I have seen, fall within these guidelines.

My advice to site owners is to maintain a clean, high quality, and organized site that genuinely interests people. Don’t invest time into removing low quality backlinks and only invest some time into high quality backlink molding. I think it’s more important to spread awareness about your site, instead. If people like what they see, then they’ll come back many times over, and also they’ll link to it as well. Additionally, encouraging people to share information is very helpful too.

So what do you think? Do you think that it’s worth your time to remove low quality backlinks? What about spending time towards backlink molding? And what about time spent marketing and promoting your site? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Feedage.com is a categorized and searchable RSS feed directory. It’s further explained that their goal is to categorize and organize large numbers of RSS data feeds to make viewing them more easier for end users. The directory was created and grown by adding RSS feeds into queue. Machine readable pages are then created off the partial item syndication of each RSS feed queued. In other words, when a new RSS feed is added into their directory, a new webpage is created that syndicates the partial feed of each entry.

The problem that I have with Feedage.com is that syndicated content is being used to display contextual based ads. This is nothing new, and in fact, many site do this. However, many blog authors and site owners take offense to other people using their content to earn revenue.

And then there are some sites such as Digg.com, don’t necessarily syndicate content, but instead monetize the user submitted content that is geared towards introducing a full story. That then creates a deterrence towards allowing people to actually click and view the story. This method is more accepted and tolerated, especially when sites such as Digg.com deliver traffic to the source site.

In the case with sites such as Feedage.com, majority are considered spam, splog, or sponge sites. That is of course is until the site in question is proven to generate incoming traffic to the source site. And that is where I am at with Feedage.com. This site syndicates the RSS feeds from blogs and uses the content to overly saturate pages with contextual based ads. Also, and in many cases with newer blogs, Feedage.com can rob source sites from their position in search engines. Since Feedage.com is more established than many of the source blogs its content is originating, many of the cases, the Feedage.com page will rank better than the source page.

Having that said, you might then question whether it’s worth submitting your RSS feed into their directory. Many people obviously would feel like it’s not. However, before a decision is made, there are a two benefits towards using Feedage.com which are the potential to increase traffic and potential to increase SEO value of your source site.

If you decide to submit your RSS feed into the Feedage.com directory, my past records have shown that I have received traffic from their site. It isn’t a lot, but it’s traffic I received without applying any tweaks or optimizations to. Here is what I recommend doing to make the best of your listing.

If you’re using WordPress, I recommend installing the Feedage.com Plugin and allowing a percentage visitors subscribe to your Feedage.com RSS Feed rather than your source feed, or FeedBurner feed. If you don’t have a WordPress blog, or you do and simply don’t want to install the plugin, I recommend redirecting your source feed to the Feedage.com RSS feed.

In either case, the purpose of directing traffic to your Feedage.com RSS feed is to gain subscribers. The reason why you want to increase the number of subscribers assigned to your Feedage.com feed is because the more you have subscribed, the higher you rank in the Feedage.com directory.

You don’t have to convert your entire RSS reader base to Feedage.com. Simply observe the number of subscribers it will take to rank #1 in their directory. Once you reach that number, then you can pull the plug and point your blogs RSS feed back to the source URL or FeedBurner.

The next element that might interest you is backlinks. When you submit your RSS feed into the Feedage.com directory, your content is syndicated on a webpage. Links to your homepage, and individual post page are made. These are all dofollow intext links. By default, many people might discount the value in these Feedage.com pages; however, I have seen a quite a few, and many have established PageRank as high as 5. The trick is to point links to your Feedage.com page.

If you take your Feedage.com page seriously, you’re going to generate a natural flow of traffic and links pointing to it. Over time, and a shorter period than many believe, your Feedage.com page will establish PageRank. Also, one thing to consider is the more popular your Feedage.com page gets, the more internal exposure it receives within Feedage.com itself. Ultimately, your Feedage.com page could become the featured blog on the homepage.

In summary, I think sites like Feedage.com tend to be very spammy, and low in quality. Typically, search engines feel the same. However, and for whatever reason, both people and search engines approve of Feedage.com. I think they should reduce the number contextual ads and also re-position them slightly.

If your blog is somewhat new and doesn’t rank well in the search engines already, you may find Feedage.com stealing your position. Which I guess is fine if you’re site isn’t ranking anyway. Keep in mind, only a small percentage of Feedage.com traffic will reach your site. The majority will click on the ads or click back after being subjected to viewing the ads.

What are your thoughts about Feedage.com, and similar sites? Do you think there is more harm than good allowing your content to be syndicated on a site that could potentially outrank your own blog posts? Do you think that it’s acceptable for other people to syndicate your content for the purpose of displaying contextual based ads and earning revenue?

Let’s consider coding. Both WordPress and Blogger maintain excellent coding standards. Each platform comes with a standard (approved) template that meets the W3C standards. Actually, Blogger comes with around 25 and WordPress only has one. In both platforms, however, there are hundreds of open sourced templates available that also meet the coding standards. These templates can be downloaded and installed at no charge.

What about using relevant keywords? With a blog, you have all the tools needed to write about the topics you want and stay on topic. Each blogging platform gives you the ability to categorize, label, and or tag your articles by sub-topic. Writing content based on relevant keywords comes very easy doing so on a blog. Housing your content within a blog also gives you the ability to stay organized yourself and drill down into micro niche keywords and more longtail keyword topics.

Considering the ease of writing content around relevant keywords, obviously the placement of keywords comes easy too. With most blog platforms, especially Blogger and WordPress, users are given a rich text editor to use. This means that you can properly write content, placing your keywords in your intro paragraphs, and control the amount of reinforcing keywords within the body content and closing paragraph. Also, and most importantly, the rich text editor allows you to easily using heading, bold, and italic tags. Your rich text is formatted into W3C compliant HTML code in the background.

Last item is gaining inbound links to your site. Now, this part is something that not many people do very often. If you have a website and you’re trying to get it to rank for top rated keywords, the blog itself is what can thrust your website into top rankings. The key to doing this is to make sure that you’re blog is completely separate from your website. Meaning, if your website is YOURBUSINESS.COM, don’t make your blog YOURBUSINESS.COM/BLOG or BLOG.YOURBUSINESS.COM.

Instead, make your blog something like YOURBUSINESSBLOG.com. Additionally, your blog and website should be different IP addresses, in fact, maybe hosted by different companies. The purpose of doing this is to have the ability to point links back to your website and have search engines credit these links as true external inbound links.

This part handles a portion of inbound links to your website, which there should also be other link campaigns going on as well. Perhaps a second or third blog as well. Now, with the blog itself, because you’re writing (or should be) excellent content that appeals to people, their natural behavior will be to link to the articles on your blog. Some readers may share your articles with friends by submitting them into social networking site such as Digg, Twitter, FaceBook, and StumbleUpon. When that happens, your articles will be viewed by more people. Search engines, especially Google, keep track of this.

To summarize. A blog is a great thing to have if you’re focused on SEO. A blog can be used to help a main website rank better in search engines simply due to increasing inbound links. Secondly, a blog is a natural inbound link magnet itself. Thirdly, a blog provides users with excellent publishing tools to write and format content in a search engine friendly way. All in all, if you have a website, it would be an excellent idea to also have a blog, covering a relevant topic to your main site. Doing so could be the difference of your site landing on page one, or page doesn’t matter.

There is actually! And, it’s a darn good way too. For a long time I have know about this, but couldn’t figure out a good way to do this. I searched for software and never found anything, and the only thing I found that could do this for me was a half functional website.

But, before I get too far ahead here, I need to explain to you how you can increase your PageRank. As you may know, backlinks are needed in order to get more PageRank. More so, backlinks with high PageRank are even more important.

So, who the heck is going to give you free links from pages with high PageRank? Well, the answer is simple… you are! You might not realize this, but many of your own pages within your site have established their own level of PageRank.

I have known this for awhile, but the problem I always had was finding them. Yes, I can manually search for them, but this takes a long time and kind of feels like fishing in a pond with only one fish in it.

If there was software that could scan all my pages automatically and then sort them by highest PageRank first, that would be ideal. I never could find anything that would do something like this until a few weeks ago. Naturally, the software comes in the form of a Firefox Add-on.

The add-on is called, SeoQuake. If you download and install this add-on and search your own site using Yahoo Site Explorer, you can quickly and easily discover and sort all your internal pages by their PageRank level. You can also do this by searching for your site in Google too. Take a look at the screen shot below. It will show you SeoHosting.com’s pages sorted by PageRank:

[click image to view full size]

Doing this then gives you a tally of how many pages you can use within your own site for link building. You can use these pages to help boost your own home page PageRank, or use these pages to help establish and boost the PageRank of newly built sites you have developed.

Be careful not to build links to quickly, you don’t want to do anything unnatural because Google is kind of smart and may catch on to what you’re doing. The key here is having an available research to use towards proper link building. If you’re too aggressive with our link building campaign, you may even ruin the value of your high quality pages.

What else can you do to help increase PageRank quickly? Drop a comment below and share your thoughts.

Today, we are going to discuss Part II. When I wrote the first post, I decided to break things down into sections. If I didn’t I would have just created an eBook for you to download. So with that said, let me show you another method towards getting free backlinks to your web site or blog.

Now, many of you guys and gals know about companies such as Text-Link-Ads.com and ReviewMe.com. Make no mistake, these type of businesses work and work very well. For those who don’t know what these services offer, they provide people with a way to purchase backlinks. Text-Link-Ads.com is more blunt about it and ReviewMe.com attempts to sugar coat the process by making publishers write a crafty review about the site needing the backlink.

Both places are owned by the same company and both companies are hot on Google’s radar. Selling links for the purpose of boosting PageRank is against Google’s Web Master Guidelines. So when you use places such as the two services mentioned above, you really put your blog, web site and or business at risk. With that said, there are ways towards getting around this so that you can totally boost your PageRank and not get caught.

Now, I must tell you that this tip is more effective for bloggers, especially bloggers who have a bunch of other friends who are bloggers too. If this isn’t you, then what I am about to show you still is possible, but you will be challenged a little bit with executing. With that said, let’s continue on.

The first step is choosing the keywords or phrases that you want to have link to your blog or web site. In the tutorial, we’re going to use the word Traffic. Second thing we want to do is do a scan on different blogs that have used the word traffic. This is where having blog friends can really help you in this situation. In this tutorial we’re going to use SEOHosting.com, because we are all Best Friends with SEOHosting.com, right?

In order to find the blog posts on SEOHosting.com’s blog that use the word traffic, we need to use Google. Ironically, we are going to use the same search engine in which we are attempting to build backinks towards ranking better on. I find that funny, but at any rate, here is how you do it.

In the Google search bar type: traffic site:seohosting.com/blog

When you do that, you will see a complete listing of pages that have the word traffic on it. Now, I am not sure how familiar you are with WordPress, but publishers are not able to add links to category sections. So any listing you see that has the word category in the url of the listing in the SERP doesn’t count. Same goes with tag and archive. The little treasures you are looking for are the blog posts. In order to have Google display only the blog posts that have the word traffic on it you can do the following:

In the Google search bar type: traffic -category -tag -archives site:seohosting.com/blog

What this will do, is strip away all of the categories, tags and archives from the results and only display blog posts with that have the word traffic in it. Does this sound too hard to remember? I don’t know about you, but things like this can be kind of tricky. But that’s ok, these special searches you are doing are called Advanced Operator searches. Google has a bunch of them that you can do. If you can’t remember how to do all this technical Google filtering, then check this out:

This is called Google Advanced Search. In fact, here is a LIVE EXAMPLE of the above screen shot. All you have to do is answer a few simple questions, and Google will filter the results how you want it.

So what is the point to all this? Well, I have shown you a lot of information here, so let’s recap. The purpose of doing all this is to find blog posts on SEOHosting.com’s blog that use the word traffic. Again, we are trying to get our own web site to rank in Google for the word traffic and in order to do that, we are going to need help from our blogger friends.

Now that we know which posts on SEOHosting.com’s blog that uses the word traffic, we can pick out a few of the posts, and contact the author of the blog and ask him to edit the post and add the link in. If you are scanning the blogs of your friends, having success in this request should not be too difficult at all.

Keep in mind, you don’t want to have more than maybe ten posts from one blog to point links back to yours. I can not PROVE this, this is just my opinion. However, with my link building techniques, I play things very safe. Also, you don’t want to score a ton of backlinks in a short period of time, if you do, Google will catch that and hunt you down.

I hope that you found this article to be helpful. As always, I would love to hear from you. What are some other ways that you score free backlinks? Drop me a comment and share your thoughts.

The single most difficult thing with running a blog or web site is scoring traffic and landing backlinks, Especially if your blog or web site is geared towards promoting affiliate products. So how does a blogger or as webmaster increase traffic and score backlinks? Well, let’s start with reading the question that I was asked:

Hi Garry,

I am working on a couple of new sites at the moment that I wouldn’t usually use WordPress for but as you know I have been learning the ins & out’s of WordPress for a few months now so have decided to go ahead and use it for these new sites to see how it pans out.

Once I have the sites completed, I know I can gain organic search results over time and can even provide relevant links from other sites of mine. With that said, can you recommend any other ways of getting links/traffic to an affiliate based site?

With your Micro Niche Sites, do you invest time in link building to these sites or are they a truly “build, walk away and see what happens” type of sites?

I do want to build, walk away and see what happens with a few of these sites but I also want them to at least generate an asdense monthly payment along with some affiliate payments. Any advice is well appreciated.

Thanks, dave.

Wow! When I read this question that Dave had asked me, I was very excited to provide my feedback not only for him, but for all of my blog readers. Secondly, I now look forward to sharing this with you. Here is my response back to Dave.

Hi Dave,

I great way to get organic links is to have a bunch of friends who will bend over backwards for you. If you simply be a super nice guy and help people as much as you can afford to, when it comes time to asking for help in return, such as asking for a few backlinks on some blog posts that you have keywords you are targeting on it, friends will grant these requests.

Secondly, friends will also voluntarily advertise your blog or site on their blog or site if you ask them to. This is very successful because the post comes from the author in which many people follow.

Look at it this way, tomorrow, if I wrote a blog post and told everyone to check out John Doe’s Blog because he is offering something that I feel everyone will enjoy, he will end up getting quite a bit of traffic because I suggested to my readers that he has someone worth their while.

Asking… it never hurts to ask. The worst someone can say is, “No!” Never take offense when someone says NO, it’s a crap shoot… some people will grant your requests, others will not… no big deal.

I ask for TONS of favors from my friends, but also too I work my tail off to make sure that I help them TWO FOLD in return. At any given time, and I am not tooting my horn, I can get well over 100 high quality backlinks to any site I want within just a few hours. You have to be careful of that though. You never want to channel links to a web site or blog too quickly. If you do, Google has filters that catch that and I believe that will get you on their radar. Getting on Google’s radar is something that you don’t want to have happen.

Like I said, there is a balance… you can’t link build too aggressively. Google red flags that…. you got to maintain a nice steady pace and build as naturally and organically as possible.

You asked me if I invest time into link building? YES! On sites that target keywords that are too strong and competitive just to rank organically on their own without backlinks, yeah… I get links. These links though aren’t just, “Hey Bob, can you add me to your blogroll?” These are very well thought out and personalized backlinks that I put a lot of time into scoring.

Growing a site in a competitive niche is very much like being in chemistry class. I don’t spend too much time with competitive keywords, I more go after the ones that just naturally rank on their own in the top ten simply by creating the content, getting the page indexed and filling a VOID in the Google SERP.

After reading Dave’s question and reading my response to his question, what else can you add to this? What are some other creative ways towards scoring backlinks and increasing traffic to your blog or web site that is geared towards promoting affiliate based products?  Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.