Sharing Links

[AirbrushDreams]

Sorry for asking again, but my website is losing ground on the Internet for listing. We can all help each other out by sharing links on each others sites. If you would like to share your link with me and I will place your link on a links page on my website and you could place my link on your site it would be greatly appreciated. Having external links pointing back at your site on your shows that your site is a net friendly site in the eyes of search engines and helps to boost your algorithms. Also these links need to be related to your search topics, so a search in Airbrush Art would need back links in same topic sites. That is why we all can help each other out.

http://www.airbrush-dreams.com/

Thanks Fred

[Akarin]

Hey Fred!

I am new to the board and just returning to airbrushing. However currently I am an Internet Marketing consultant and I am a certified Google Adwords Professional. What you are saying is partially correct. The problem is when Google sees that the links are bi-directional, then the power of the links is almost zero. The links need to be unidirectional to be effective. Otherwise Google see's it as a buddy arrangement.

What you and everyone else needs to do is create an "SEO Link Wheel" (Google it to learn more). Don't pay the consultants you see there unless you want to because you can do all this yourself for free.

36178

Basically a link wheel looks like a wagon wheel where your site is the hub and blog/social media sites make the wheel and the unidirectional connections to your site make the spokes. Google sees that and gives your site a boost thinking that all these other sites think your is important. Here is a list of sites that you can create free accounts and post airbrush related content to create unidirectional links back to your site:

Hubpages.com
Vox.com
Weebly.com
Wetpaint.com
Wikispaces.com
Wordpress.com
Xanga.com
Zimbio.com
Blog.com
Blogetery.com
Edublogs.org
Ehow.com
Gather.com
Insanejournal.com
Jimdo.com
Nexo.com
Ning.com
Onsugar.com
Quizilla.com
Sosblog.com
Tripod.com
Tumblr.com
Multiply.com
Squarespace.com
Bebo.com
Blogspot.com
Linkedln.com.com
Bravejournal
ArticlesFactory.com
Msnspaces.com
Articlesnatch.com
Articlecity.com
Articledashboard.com
Articlesbase.com
Articlealley.com
EzineArticles.com
GoArticles.com
Amazines.com
Squidoo.com
Ideamarketers.com
SearchWarp.dom
Isnare.com
WebProNews.com
Netcipia.com
Livejournal.com

Yeah, it's a lot of writing. That's why there are consultants out there that actually outsource all the work to the Philippines. But if you can write, you can do all this for free. Chances are that your competitors are not even doing this so setting up just a couple of unidirectional links from these major sites may be what you need for your boost.

Hope this helps!

Akarin

[Norm]

Akarin, some great info there... thanks for sharing!

[AirbrushDreams]

Thanks a lot Akarin I will do that.

Fred

[AndyW]

Damn lot of reading to do, great info Akarin

[bigwater]

Akarin is absolutely right. Search engine optimization is a science. I have to spend an inordinate amount of time making sure that there aren't canceling linkbacks to this site. If ten people on this site put links up to their sites in their signature, and then put link backs to this site from their site out of perceived courtesy, we'll lose rankings in the search engines big time. If A links to B and B links to A... that's bad news. The ping pong effect of the search engine spiders bouncing back and forth between the two sites ends up dropping both A and B off the list. If A links to B, B links to C and C links to A... you get somewhat better results in ranking. But the bigger the link wheel, the better. A links to B who links to C to links to D... all the way to Z before it comes back to A... Top of the world.

I have no problem with people posting links to their site from here, I just would prefer that if you do link to your site from here that you don't put a linkback to here on your site. We get enough spider traffic here to index our site, and it will ultimately help us both if you don't link back to us. Mention us on your site if you want to tell the world what an awesome place this is, but do it in plain text and make the reader look it up themselves. Linkbacks kill.

[AndyW]

Ta for the explains Ron

[AirbrushDreams]

All good information. I never knew that the back-link would cause an issue. That is vary usefull to know big water. I am not that smart to begin with so it is always an up hill battle. I will keep that in mind.

What would be a good sized wheel of links to boost one up into the top 3 pages?

Fred

[bigwater]

The bigger the wheel the better. Search engines change the way their rankings pick and choose on an ongoing basis... that's what makes it a science and that's why there are professional companies out there that do nothing other than to analyze the search engines behavior and keep you on the top. They have software that will analyze your site and tell them what links need to be removed, what links need to be added, etc.

Ideally, you want to have your site linked to many different sites, each of which will be linked to other sites, but not back linked to each other and not back linked directly to yours. It's really more like a spider web than a wheel, but it's easier to understand as a wheel. At many points down the wheel, there will be a link back to yours, but it won't be a direct link back. The search engine may have to encounter three hops or a dozen hops or 100 hops before it lands on your site again, but now it's found you again after spidering 100 sites, and your rank increases because it sees more and more references to your site. These hops work at blinding speed, so there's not a whole lot of time difference between three hops and 100. The goal is to confuse the search engine so that it doesn't think it's ping ponging between two sites and cut you both off from the spidering process, so the more hops between visits to your site, the better.

[AndyW]

Ahhh.........see was reading where the wheels are considered bad.......get good initial ranking, then it basically you are spragged as like a link farm, the search engines see the links then note the same IP so your ranking then plummets.

Does the hop as you describe it Ron stop that from happening?

[Akarin]

here is the difference. If you create the link wheel, then you are putting up relevant content about airbrushing (not some careless marketing company). When you outsource to these overseas contractors for cheap, then you will find a 200-300 word post about your airbrushing site right next to 200-300 word post about weight loss pills. Those can be identified as link farms.

Google's aim is to provide searchers with the most relevant and important information on which the surfer is researching and filter out spam. If you create ORIGNIAL text content (Google hates copies) like a regular human then you should be fine. Also if you nail down the mechanics of your site to the level of guys you are seeing on the first page, then you have a chance to be up there with them. The only difference between #1 and #10 if all mechanics are correct, is the number of QUALITY unidirectional links going to the site. Google doesn't care if you think you're important; Google only cares if everyone ELSE thinks you're important.

As in Fred's case, at this time he has 16 pages indexed by Google. Assuming the long tail keywords he wants is "custom airbrush new york" His top 10 competitors (1st page... oh and even when results are in the millions, you only truly compete with the first 10 web sites) and their inbound links as counted by Google:

ipaintfx dot com
airmagination dot com
ripper1 dot com
nypartyartz dot com
airbrushartshop dot com
myspace dot com/airbrushbert/photos/284602
smairbrushing dot com
partypop dot com
sundaranyc dot com
revolutionpaint dot com

Actually that isn't a good keyword for him since it is mixed with sites from NYC and tanning salons. Of note, airmagination has an Alexa Traffic ranking of about 1,000 which means a ton of people go there (I would assume because of the names of the hip hop artists they paint). But you get the point. Also inbound links have a weighted scoring system called Page Rank that goes from unranked,0-10 with 10 being the highest. So when someone like CNN (Page Rank 10) or ESPN (PR 8) puts a link to your site on theirs, that one is worth large multiples of links from a site like Fred's (his actually weighs in at a very respectable PR2)

[Akarin]

apparently the domains auto turn to links on the vb board so I had to edit them. Don't want to send those guys extra traffic :)

[AndyW]

Lol my head is hurting ha ha..............get my finger out an finish rebuilding my site again and have a go, not for a business sense as this is all fun but would be interesting to see.

Now got to try and digest it all.

[shadow82]

Why not set up a list for members who want to be a part of a "wheel" and set one up?
Like Andy I don't do this for a living its just for fun but I know a lot of you peeps do
this as your job. With a bit of help from Akarin and Ron (If you guys have the time to
help out) then it would help the other folks,just a thought.

[bigwater]

I wouldn't mind if you guys want to set up a wheel, but we'll need a separate forum not accessable to guests for it to be of any benefit. Just the discussion of a link wheel in an open forum (such as this thread) that can be indexed by the spiders (which this forum can) is death to the wheel before it even starts.

Let me know if there's enough interest. I'll create a new forum that only active members have access to, move this thread to that forum, and accept applications for moderator of that forum. JimmyG and I have enough on our plate administrating the entire board without working out the logistics of a link wheel. While I know quite a bit about SEO, I don't have the time to eat, breathe and sleep it. I'm sure it could benefit the members if handled correctly, but somebody's going to have to "grease the wheel" so to speak. Somebody is going to need to tell which members to link to what other members, and where the links are safe to come back to this site. We're going to need a dedicated person who understands SEO (like Akarin) that is willing to devote a few minutes per day to spreadsheet the logistics of it.

[AndyW]

Tis a head burst but as said would need somebody who knows this.

[Akarin]

lol sorry guys for the delay. I was on a family vacation. And just like any meeting, the person that doesn't shows up always gets the assignments ;)

Although honored for the recommendation, my plate is too full at the moment. This does take some time and some whip cracking on getting content. I am not a talented writer and find it quite boring (which is why we are visual artists, right?) so I usually outsource my content writing. In fact here is a tip of who I use: textbroker dot com , When I setup SEO blogs I buy 52, 300 word articles for just a couple bucks for each article. You'll get all 52 in a couple days since the writing is done in parallel. Then you load them all into WordPress, Joomla, or whatever Content Management System and make each pop out in the future on every Monday for a year (yes you can PRELOAD content into sites to have it show later so it runs on auto pilot).

I think with everything in this thread, there is enough information to point people in the right direction. All of this is light years beyond the comprehension of most artists in the realm of Internet marketing so if anyone does just a couple things, then they should see dramatic results beyond their local competition.

When I get my new pieces together and start to market them online, I will be doing all of this link wheeling for myself. However link wheels don't work as well if all links in the wheel point to just one site. What I may do is just co-op some costs with other airbrushers here to diversify the links and together we can all gain some economies of scale in boosting our rankings.