Take Your Links and Shove Them

So I’ve taken a larger interest in link development lately on many of my sites. I previously concentrated on content and more on-page SEO items. Unique titles, good use of H1 tags, and unique meta descriptions have been a major focus most of the last 4 months. Now that I am working more on off-page factors (links!), I am starting to wonder what the heck I am wasting my time on. Ok, I realize it’s not a waste of time, but link development surely seems to bring disparate opinions out.

Go for the PR?

If one were to buy links, and I’m not condoning or dis’ing it, should you look for PR as the key? There is an entire camp of people who seem to think that getting links from a high PR site in and of itself is a waste of time. Yes a non-reciprocal link has value, but buying for PR is a waste of time they would indicate. Well… if that is that case, why are the prices of links for sale seemingly so highly correlated with PR. Is PR just a way to sulf-justify charging more for a link? Furthermore, the PR link naysayers fall to the “increasing your PR will not increase your search rankings” punchline. Is this really true?

Go For the Traffic?Â

Ok, so if you are not looking for links for PR reasons, then you must be looking for links for traffic reasons. Right? That seems to make sense to me with regards to links from highly trafficed sites. But there must be a gazillion (technical term) directories out there selling (err reviewing) links. I bet most of them get less than 500 visitors a month. Of those visitors, maybe 50 will see the page your link is on (if you are lucky). Of those 50, maybe you get one click. Was it worth it?

Where Do You Stand?

This is a topic where I do not have a strong opinion. My general philosophy is to take advantage of small profits and exploit them (e.g., get as many links as you can on as many sites as yuo can find — regardless of their traffic, and hope you get 1 visit per month from each from now until I’m pushing up daisies). But, if it takes 5 hours a month, to generate an extra 20 page views a month, the payoff seems to be non-existent.

If however, the increase in PR does increase my rankings in the search engines, then it seems to make more sense to spend those same 5 hours on high PR link development.

I don’t know… do you?

Don’t Link To Me?

It amazes me that some companies try so hard to not be linked from a search engine, while every SEO person I know is struggling to get links. Copiepresse, an organization which manages copyright for the Belgian French- and German-speaking press (I won’t link to them because I don’t want to have them mad at me – lol), went after Google to stop them from producing snippets of articles on Google. They seem to think that the links from Google news were impacting the revenue stream of their clients. Their logic seemed a little shakey at best to me. Hmmm… Links => Potential Visitors => Revenue… sounds simple to me.

Note to search engines: I have meta descriptions and links both available whenever you want to link to me

This just seems so bizarre to me. I would actually like to see Google comply. Just remove every last link to these newspapers. Then we will see if their revenue takes a hit.Â

Free Website Statistics From Google

Yet again Google has jumped to the front of the line in a service they offer. With Google Analytics webmasters can get detailed statistics about web traffic with a simple Javascript include in the header section of their pages. In the case of most of my dynamic sites, this was accomplished by simple placing this Javascript include in a single file. The truly wild fact about this service is that they used to charge a nice chunk of change for it before the decision to give it away for free. They may have a plan for introducing value add services for a fee in the future, but the free data now is quite nice.

It was slow getting initial traffic reports at first (I started using this during the initial crunch of new users), but after a few days of data, I find it well worth the initial wait. Data, data, data… from a variety of perspectives. You can view data from an executive’s perspective, a webmaster, or a marketing perspective.
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