What works anymore? Obviously conflicting opinions, but many have said on this and other forums that, in terms of google at least: Link directories no longer work, or won't work in the not too distant future. Google devalues them because there is no theme, they don't add meaningful content, and the structure is easily discovered by algo; paid directories, if they haven't been de-indexed, will certainly (perhaps especially) be so in the future. Links from a given blog don't work - in other words, blogging with a signature that includes a link back to one's site doesn't work; Submitting a given article to more than one article site doesn't work - the signature, containing the same text around the hyperlink, is easily discovered and discounted; internal links no longer work, or signs are that they are being devalued - to quote from Compar's thread, from an article by Dirk Johnson: Given all this, is the only way to get rank that will sustain itself what many have said all along - content, and natural link selection? A naive question, perhaps, but one wonders why try the above strategies when it may be all for naught... Spent some time looking around over the last several weeks, and learned so much - whatever comes of the web or this intended business, I'm grateful to have learned. It is a sea and there is no clear course... Paul
Use one way linking between similar sites. There is no better system than this. 50 one way themed links can raise your search rankings 200-500. Beleive me. Being a SEO guy we had started to experiment this technique 1 year back and most of the sites are now in Top 3 page for their keywords.
how should one build one-way linking BETWEEN sites? thats actually called reciprocal linking and thus does not count as a valuable one-way link anymore !?
Good directories will never be de-indexed. BOTW, DMOZ are still around with good PR. The ones that are gone were either dmoz clones, selling PR (hotvsnot) or listed every site that got submitted and linked to tons of spam. Lots of others are still around. Probably some you've never heard of too.. Blog links must work, or blog spam wouldn't happen. Writing unique articles for sites does work. Article spamming probably does not. The problem with most people who write articles is that they view it as a quick means to an end. Without thinking about what they are doing..they write a 500 word article (or pay $5 for one) and submit it to 1000 sites and think, well, there are 1000 links. Yeah, that was bound to last. internal links must carry some weight. Otherwise, how does google get what pages are initially about. I have hundreds of top 10 rankings for pages that have no external links to them.
All depends on the search engine msn seems to love blog links, blog spammers hold many top positions link directory still seem to have some benefit in all SE, I just did a couple hundred directory submissions for a white hat site, and it got a boost in google and msn reciprical links still work great in msn and yahoo
I think that Google is starting to look for REAL content that is orginal and fresh. Links between these types of sites get merit and make believe sites like link directories or sites with no content get discounted. I do not think that links have to be just one way but I do think they need to be of quality. I also noticed that older sites with good content that add new content on a regular basis do the best.
thats exactly what i think. it would be nonsense if reciprocating would completely die. if that would happen no one would be allowed to link to related resources with each other!! that's ridiculous and some ppl just exaggerated this shortly after Jagger #1
I think with Article submission it tends to work well if you write a very useful piece on a topic you know well, use the article submission sites which list your piece for others to use on their own sites, I noticed sitepronews get their articles this way. If 300 sites worldwide grab your article and link back to you (which is part of the deal) then that's a happy 300 inbound links without linking back to them. It's been proven on a few sites I've seen, you just can't get too many new links each month or Google won't accedit them, it's looks to artificial.
i normally write a useful article and submit it to one or 2 article sites then also add the article to my website for some extra content. Is this worthwhile then? i never really bthered submitting to 100s of article sites because i always pressumed google would see that the information has been duplicated and ignore it
Even if the content is a complete duplicate across all the article sites, the page probably won't show high in the SERPs, but the backlinks are still completely valid in my experience, and I can't imagine why they ever wouldn't be.