Thanks for the info Will. One quick question, what are your thoughts on getting unrelated reciprocal links? Is it worthwhile or a waste of time? I know the SE's are different i.e. MSN isn't fussy about where your links are coming from and loves fresh content which is why it is so easy to rank well there but are you shooting yourself in the foot with respect to Yahoo and Google by linking to those unrelated sites? I have always been aggresive with my linking in the past by simply linking with anyone who has decent PR and simply trying to get as many as possible. However perhaps I should be changing my strategy. Cheers, Mike.
That answer appears to be changing. In the beginning, all links were good. Then, all links were good, but some links were better than others. Now, and probably moreso in the future, some links might actually be harmful. It's too soon to tell with a strong degree of certainty. Personally, I have avoided reciprocal linking for some time. This is not because of any search engine related reason. My reasons have been 1) I just don't like to clutter my sites and 2) I don't like the hassle of dealing with the reciprocal link people. On a search engine related note, I believe that it is pretty easy for a search engine to detect and devalue links from a links page.
Search for a thread that will help me as a newbie and this definitely helps. Great post. Better late than never.
Another excellen way to obtain relevent one way links to your site from different IP's is to start free blogs at places like http://www.blogger.com and http://www.blogurple.com and put your content there, then link to your main site. Then links the free blogs to each other for increased spidering.
Wouldnt there be a duplication penalty if there was your content on more then one site? I'm just trying get an idea of how this works.
You should only put teasers on to the satelite blogs, so that interested traffic is driven to your main site. This deals with the duplicate content issue, and is important if you monetise you main site. Duplicate content penalty means that only one of the duplicate pages will be shown in the SERPs. If you own all of the duplicate pages, then it really doesn't matter if only one is shown. I think. Cryo.