[I realized I should've posted on this forum as opposed to the blogging forum.] The main reason to having many inbound links is to increase your rankings on various SEs. And we all know that mulitple link exchanges help increase multiple outlets to let SEs like Google to index and rank us accordingly. Now with respect to Blogs, many of us know that they can help us with our SE rankings. And let's say that your website has a blog component to it. And if you blog often and blog relevant content that is filled with rich keywords , then this can help you boost your search rankings. Do you think a case can be made that by blogging often, you can help reduce the amount of inbound links that you need to remain competitive with your SERPS. Let's say that a website with no blog and stays rather static with it's content needs about 50 inbound links to remain on the first page of Google. But what if you have a blog installed onto the website and because you blog often, you probably don't need as many inbound or reciprocal links. Perhaps now, you only need 25 reciprocal links to remain on the first page of Google. Because everytime you blog, you ping the blog search engines and let them know that new relevant content is added to your site. And by blogging often and blogging relevant content, you don't need to pay another SEO company to keep doing link exchange work for you every month as well. What are your thoughts about how blogging effectively can help play a part in search algorithms and it's ability to nullify or reduce the need to keep engaging in link exchanges? In many respects, by having a blog, you reduce the burden of link exchange work. Because in effect, a blog with consistent fresh content IS another way of creating an outlet like Google to index and rank your site accordingly.
Blogging can be a part of the SEO strategy, but it's just one of many things. If you search on forums, of what people thought about FFA links 3 years from today, they used to say FFA is the best Things change with time, so keeping yourself moving with the industry is important. In that case, if you are doing SEO fulltime for yourself, it does make sense, but then that is practical only when you have enough time, and your business otherwise doe snot need attention.
Honey, Just to clarify, I meant that if a SEO do-it-yourselfer implemented the strategy and not with regards to SEO professionals. What's FFA?
Free-For-All directories. The ones that nowadays are often known as Linkfarms because err.. Thats what they kinda were: Linkfarms. Irrelevant links just to get links.
I think that blogging have a "tendency" to help, because you will be adding relevant content. It can also be though, that on a moment you add content that will "dilute" your keyword density on that page and in fact work against your seo efforts.
Is it still a link farm if it's relevant links, as opposed to unrelevant, that try to get links with each other? Because in that case, half of the reciprocal linking out there might be link farms as well. Just a thought.
Actually if you REALLY blog, with good enough content that others want to link to your blog or better yet syndicate your blog, thereby giving you lots of links - I think it can be AWESOME for your link strategy. I have had such great success with my blog on every level (traffic quadruled in 2 months, #1 on all the search engines, tons of in-bound links) that blogging is the ONLY SEO strategy that I focus on every single day. It's well worth it.
Interestingly, I helped a friend setup a real estate blog. Within 6 wks or so, she achieved top 3 rankings for MSN and yahoo. Strangely, she started from #400 on Google and hit #200 within 3 weeks. But then, 2 weeks ago, when Google made their changes, she dropped back to #500 with her blog. She blogs consistently. Practically everyday on her blog. What can I say, she speaks real estate. Does anyone know what happened with the rankings? The blog which is hosted on Squarespace is pretty well optimized, with respect to on page factors (ie; all in anchor text, themed structures, etc...) Was it because she blogged too much and used the keywords too often in her titles and sometimes within the blog entry itself???
Driven it could have just been a hicup with google or what I am guessing is that she acquired to many links to fast and from the same C-block and it tripped a filter with google. I am going to assume she kept the same rankings with msn and yahoo and didnt lose those. Blogging is good, I know of another site that ranks very well with A LOT of BLs from blogs for a major key phrase in the real estate industry.