Buy One Way Links

What would you do to get EDU links? There is a popular belief that EDU links are the holy grail of search engine optimization. Are  EDU links really that powerful and is it worth going to a lot of extra effort to get EDU links?

The theory is that Google assigns a lot of authority to websites of colleges and other educational institutions. I don’t think there is any question of whether a link from an authority site is better than a link from a non-authority site. If I had my choice of one link from authority site or  10 links from various non-authority sites I would take the one link any time.

Considering the above statements and speculations the question boils down to whether educational domain sites really carry more authority than other sites. Just like in other areas of life there are very few absolutes in search engine optimization. My opinion is that EDU links on average are actually superior to other links.

There will be some people who will disagree with me primarily because of a statement that one of the Google employees made in early 2008. John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, stated:

“In general, I would like to add that no, backlinks from .EDU domains generally do not get ‘additional credibility from Google.’”

I don’t really know if that statement as expressed by John is entirely accurate, but even if it is it still does not dissuade me from pursuing EDU links. Even if Google does not explicitly ascribe more value to EDU links that does not mean that on average EDU links are not more valuable than other links.

I base a lot of my SEO knowledge on my own experimentation and testing. Obviously, I read what the experts say, and take that into consideration. However, I very rarely take those statements as fact unless I have experienced them with my own sites.

I devised a simple test to compare the authority of EDU sites to other sites in general. While it is in no way a scientific test or proof that all EDU sites carry more authority than other sites, it does make it pretty clear that EDU domains are usually authority sites. Here is what I did and you can feel free to try this at home:

I made a list of 10 college sites, 10 corporate sites, and 10.net sites. I tried to balance each list with a mixture of large medium and small organizations. I then visited each site and checked the Google page rank. Obviously page rank is not the only indicator of a sites authority but it is a pretty good one regardless.

What I found was that the small colleges had page ranks of five or six, the midsized colleges six or seven, and the large colleges eight or nine. The.COM and NET sites had about two less page rank than the corresponding EDU sites.

I still wouldn’t stand on my head to get EDU links, but if I had a fairly easy way to get those links I would go for it. Well, it just so happens that I do know a fairly easy (and free) method of getting EDU links. On the other hand it is actually harder to get links from high page rank corporate and network sites.

If you register for my free newsletter you will get a report that explains in detail how to get free EDU links. This report usually sells for $27, but I have obtained the rights to provide it for free to my subscribers. Please note if you already subscribe to my newsletter you either already have this free report or receive it shortly there is no need to subscribe again.

If you want to learn how Google is looking for in deciding how to rank your blogs, nothing beats getting the scoop directly from Google. Matt Cutts did an excellent presentation at a recent word press conference. In case you don’t know who Matt Cutts is — he is a Google employee who heads up their anti-web-spam efforts. Matt is well known for providing candid insights into how Google works and what they look for.

The video is 46 minutes long, but definitely worth spending the time to view. In fact, I watched it twice, and may even watch it a third time. Matt is pretty fast and packs a lot of information into the video. I have been doing search engine optimization for a long time and I still learned a number of new things from this video.

For example — I had no idea that there was a tag Google recognizes to define the content of your page for Adsense. If you put the following tags around the meat of your posts Google will use only that section to determine what ads are shown on the page:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

There are tons of other tips, hints, and insights into the workings of Google. Please take the time to watch the video. You will be glad that you did.

You can check out Matt’s blog to see all his slides from the presentation.

I told you that free one way links were coming for my newsletter subscribers and they have arrived. All my One Way Links Newsletter subscribers can now create a free contributor account on one of my blogs and post as many 100 word or more articles as they like with one link to one of their sites each.

If this program is as successful as I think it will be and if it is manageable I plan to add more blogs where you can post your free one way links. I know everybody else wants a reciprocal link in exchange for a link from their site, but I want you to have very valuable free one way links. Instead of requiring a back link what I ask is that you promote your post on my blog either with a link from a third site or with social networking or social bookmarking sites. This will benefit you greatly because it will increase the value of your link on my blog. If you are really smart you will promote your post multiple places. That is how you create a linking network and really turn on the Google Juice.

We all know that getting one way links is a good thing and we also know that we really don’t want to buy one way links. But, what if we could get free one way links? There are plenty of linking services out there and I even use and recommend some of them, but they are not free. I have decided that my newsletter subscribers deserve some free one way links and I have found a way to provide them.

This is a work in progress and is not quite ready to use at this writing. However, I did want to let you know that I’m working on on the project and that all newsletter subscribers will be able to use the system and get one or two free one way links for as many domains as desired. If you are already subscribed to my newsletter [OWL] you don’t need to do anything — I’ll announce when the service is ready to use.

If you are not yet subscribed to the newsletter, you can do so right here and you will get in on the free linking fun as soon as it is is ready.

When I see the promise of free high PR one way links I’m there to check it out and see if it is for real. Most of the time these promises turn out to be more vapor than reality or the one way links are free but the software or knowledge to get them are anything but free.

The Authority Loophole software makes the bold promise that you will be able to get legitimate high PR links totally free. It does turn out that the software is totally free with no catches. Of course there is an up-sell product, but there is no obligation to buy the up-sell. You can use the Authority Loophole software as much as you want for free.

In order to do an honest Authority Loophole review I downloaded and installed the software. I read the short guide and the frequently asked questions and started using the program. I was impressed and disturbed at the same time.

Download the Authority Loophole software for free

There are two ways you can use the software. The more powerful mode, in my opinion, is unethical. However, I did find a way to ethically use the most powerful function of the tool. It is just a little more work, but I’m willing to do that for a clear conscience.

The software is a solid product. The more powerful mode allows you to uncover high PR blogs that use the “Top Commenter” plug-in and that do not use the no-follow tag. The other way to use the software is to search for high Page rank blogs that accept comments and potentially “do follow” links.

There is no ethical dilemma at all with the later, but I was a bit shocked at the way the product creators suggest to use the top commenter function.

The Top Commenter plug-in displays the names of the people with the most comments with a link to the site they entered in their last comment. This is displayed on every page of the blog including usually the home page. That home page link is where you get the high PR links.

What the product creators suggest is that you post a comment and use the exact same name that one of the top commenters used. That will replace the link with your selected link. I’m sorry Chris Rempel and Dave Kelly, but I don’t think that is fair to the person that put the work into being a top commenter.

Here is how you can still use the Authority Loophole with the top commenter trick and still retain your ethics.

I am finding quite a few of the blogs with the Top Commenter plug-in where it only takes one or two comments to be a legitimate top commenter yourself. Why not do that and you have a truly legitimate link and you can even make it keyword anchored if you want.

The other thing you can do is check the links from the existing top commenters and if you find one that is broken go ahead and replace it with your link since it is not doing the original commenter any good anyway.

I did find one other way to use it that I didn’t feel bad about. I stumbled on one the links that Chris Rempel had pointed to his site. It’s pointing to one my sites now and I don’t feel bad about that one at all.

I really do like the program and my Authority Loophole review is positive overall and really positive if you use it ethically. At the price of totally free why not give it a try? Download Authority Loophole.

Are you shopping for link building services? Do you know how to sort out the bad from the good services? Do you want to be sure you get effective link building services that will not do more harm than good?

The first thing you need to do is learn a little about link building yourself before you go shopping. You don’t need to be a link building expert, but you need to understand how the process works to be an informed buyer. You can learn what you need to know right here on this site. You may want to read these posts if you are not already familiar with these topics:

• How to get Links to Your Website
  
• Seven Keys to SEO Link Building Success
  
• Why One Way Backlinks?

You should now have a pretty good understanding of the kinds of linking and the benefits of one way links to your site. Let’s start by listing some of the things you should avoid in link building services.

FFA Sites and Link Farms – These don’t work, at least not long term and participating in them can actually harm your website rankings. FFA is short for “free for all” and are sites with thousands and thousands of links with no real content. Link farms are similar and the search engines may penalize your rankings if you have a lot of links from these types of sites.

Comment Spam – Posting relevant comments on blogs is a valid link building tactic, but posting junk comments just to get links is useless. Unfortunately, there are  services out there that use comment spam as their primary strategy.

Reciprocal Links – There is noting wrong with recipricol links, but if you get nothing but recipricol (or two way links) you are not getting a lot of milage out of your links. Two way links help a little but you really need one way links to get good search engine rankings. Some link building services concentrate only in getting two way links and if those are used they should be only part of your
link strategy.

Buying Links – Google hates sites that sell links and sites that buy them. If you buy links, especially high page rank links you risk the wrath og Google.  Even beyond the risk of being punished by Google buying links is by nature a very short term tactic. When you buy links you are paying for them every month and as the bills add up as some point you are going to want to stop paying for them. When you stop paying you abruptly lose the links.

We have covered what to avoid when looking for link building services. In the next article we will take a looks at the positive aspects and what you really want to get out of this kind of service.

You probably already know that to get good search engine rankings you need good keywords in your content. The search engines index your content and your the keyword phrases in your content are what triggers your page as a search result for the users query.

You also probably know that links to your pages are important to get good search engine rankings. That part of search engine optimization (SEO) is often called link building SEO. Having good keywords is just as important for link building SEO as it is for the content of your pages.

How do you get good keywords? It all starts in your head. Do a little brainstorming and come up with a “starter keyword” that is general and coveys what your site is (or will be) about. As an example let’s take the keyword lamps as our starter keyword for our link building SEO project.

If you read my newsletter you may already know that lamps is a great keyword, but it is very tough to rank for it because there is too much competition. We need some less generic keywords.

We are going to use same free tools to get a list of keywords to work with.

Visit the following link to get started:

WordTracker free keyword suggestion tool

Enter the word lamps in the keyword field and click the “hit me” button. You will get a list of related keywords and an estimated number of searches per day for those keywords. If you click on any of the listed keywords the tool does a new search with that keyword as the starting point.

If you were doing this keyword research for your link building SEO campaign you would want to copy and paste the data into a spreadsheet or text file so you can keep track of it.

I like the WordTracker tool because it is very fast and simple to use. You can also use the following tool to do the same thing and even get more data:

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

As you use the Google tool you will notice that the search volume numbers are monthly and typically much higher than the WordTracker estimates. Google’s numbers are from their own search data and are probably more accurate.

There is a lot of data you can get from the Google tool including some estimate of the amount of competition from the green bar graphic for each keyword. In another blog post I talked about a more accurate way to measure keyword competition.

There is one more free tool for your link building SEO keyword research I want to introduce:

MSN Commercial Intention Checker

It defaults to URL input but you will want to select the query mode and enter a potential keyword. It will give you either a commercial intention number or a non-commercial intent number. on their scale 1=100%. If your site is selling something this is a very important thing to know.

All of these free tools are great and they can really help you build your keyword list for link building SEO, but they have one drawback and that is that it takes an incredible amount of time to use them effectively. As we all know — time is money. The less time you need to spend on keyword research the more time you have to actually build sites and make money.

I have tried a lot of commercial keyword tools and there is only one that I use consistently. It does everything you need to pick winning keywords and it does it fast. You can generate suggested keywords, you can find commercial intent, and you can get a very accurate measure of competition and know exactly what you need to do to beat the competition.

That last point is very important. What it tells you is how many links the competitors have that use the keyword as the linking text. Once you know that you know that if you can get more keyword anchored links you can beat their search engine ranking.

This tool is called:

WebComp Analyst

It is worth every penny of it’s reasonable price because it can save you hundreds of hours of time and make you hundreds or even thousands of dollars with the information it provides.

If you are serious about link building SEO and making money online you will want this tool.

In the most general terms a blog ping is simply a way of letting sites that accept the pings know you have updated your blog. The sites that you ping can then use your blog update information in various ways. Those uses include publishing your post headlines with a link to your post, providing search engine indexing, and notifying RSS subscribers that you have a new post.

The short answer to whether a blog ping helps with one way link building is yes. You should always include pinging as part of your link building campaign. The pinging process is quick, easy and has no negative impact. Since it does help with one way link building, doing a ping after every new post is a no-brainer.

The next question is how do you do a blog ping? The two usual ways to do a blog ping are to let your blog software do it automatically when you post or to use a blog ping service and enter your blog information then let them do the pinging for you.

Most blog software that you host on your own site will do the pings for you, but normally to a very small list of ping servers. For example, WordPress blogs are set to use Pingomatic by default. Pingomatic in turn will ping 15 – 20 servers.

What if you want to ping more sites? With WordPress and many other platforms you can enter your own list of sites to automatically ping. First you need a list of working sites to enter. Then you will want to be careful that the software does not timeout while trying to ping a long list of sites. I’ll give you another option in the next paragraph.

What if your blog is hosted on a service such as Blogger? You can go to Pingomatic and other similar sites and enter your blog information and have them ping for you. However, the list of sites they ping is fairly small. If you really want the maximum link effect and traffic from your blog ping you want to ping the biggest list you can.

I had been pondering that quandary for a while and was just not satisfied with the blog ping services that were available on the Net. So, I decided to create my own private blog ping service and list as many working ping servers as I could find.

I bought a blog ping script. The list of ping servers it came with was fairly large, but most of them didn’t work. I searched the Net and found about 400 ping servers from at least a dozen different lists. I tested them all and ended up with a list of 133 blog ping servers that actually worked. I was happy with myself that I’d put the work in and ended up with a very nice private blog ping service.

I had put so much work into getting this service just the way I wanted it I started thinking it was a shame that I was the only one that could use it. That’s when I decided to share the service with my newsletter subscribers. All you need to do is register for my newsletter and confirm your email address and you will get free access to my blog ping service. Go ahead and sign up now and you can ping one or even 100 blogs if you want.

When it comes to determining keyword competition – backlinks are king. You can only do so much with on-page SEO and the site owners who are really competing for search engine ranking will probably have fairly well optimized pages. That means that analyzing keyword competition really comes down to analyzing backlinks.

Remember that backlinks, especially keyword anchored backlinks, account for the most weight in the way the search engines rank pages. That is why you need to analyze backlinks if you really want to know if you can compete for a particular keyword phrase.

The “traditional” way to estimate competition is to search for the phrase in quotes, but that is just a quick and dirty way to get some kind of idea of how much competition you have. It doesn’t really tell you how hard it will be to take a top spot in the SERPs (search engine result pages).

The best way to gauge your competition for a top position is to do backlinks analysis on the pages that are currently in the positions you want to overtake. You do that by using Yahoo Site Explorer.

So, how do you go about determining keyword competition with Yahoo Site Explorer?

Please note: I would only do this for your primary keyword unless you have backlinks analysis software to make it less time consuming. The method that follows works very well, but it does take a lot of time to do right.

First you want to be clear on what you are looking for.

You want to know how many backlinks your top ranked competition has and ultimately how many keyword anchored backlinks they have — that is the time consuming part.

Here is what you do step by step assuming it is Google rankings that you are targeting:

Search for your keyword phrase (without quotes) on Google. We are checking for Google ranking, but we will actually use Yahoo to analyze backlinks. Google is very stingy on backlinks information and only shows you a fraction of the results. Yahoo Site Explorer gives you most of the backlinks in their database.

Either copy and paste the URLs of the top pages into notepad or just keep this browser window open and open a new one to use Yahoo site explorer.

I would start with the number 10 result. It will be the easiest to research because it will probably have the smallest number of backlinks. This will also tell you if you have a good chance of getting on to page one.

Copy and paste the URL of the site into Yahoo site explorer. When Yahoo displays the results click on the “inlinks” button and then select “except from this domain” from the show inlinks drop-down. This will tell you how many backlinks that page has. If it is just a few you are done checking that site and you can be pretty sure you can beat it.

If the site has a thousands of backlinks you don’t know if you can beat it (easily) or not but if the domain, folder or file name does not contain the keyword phrase you probably can. The way to know for sure is to analyze the links to the page for anchor text which no one in their right mind would do manually for thousands of links.

There are some free tools on the Web that try to automate the above process, but the ones I have tried have too many drawbacks to really be useful.

The only tool I’ve tried for analyzing backlinks that can recommend is not free, but the cost is minimal for the time it can save you. You not only save time in checking backlinks, you also save the time you would have spent building sites that you will never be able to get ranked well because they have thousands of keyword anchored backlinks.

You will also be amazed at how many sites with thousands of backlinks only have a few, and sometimes, no keyword anchored backlinks. These sites are easy to beat, but you would never know it without good analysis of their backlinks.  I have found some real profitable keywords this way that everyone else ignored.

My keyword competition analysis took of choice is WebComp Analyst by Jonathan Leger. The software lets you do in minutes what would take you hours, if not days to do manually. WebComp Analyst is also a very good keyword research and suggestion tool.

I’ve used subscription based tools and I own a couple other big name keyword tools, but WebComp Analyst it the only one I continue to use and the only one that effectively analyzes backlinks. It is easy and it works to save me time and make me money.

There are many places you can buy one way links, but is it wise to buy links for your website? Like many other questions in life there are numerous things to consider before you decide whether or not to buy links.

First let’s take a look at the goals that would prompt someone to buy text links.

Boosting Page Rank

Whether there is a real advantage to a high page rank is another question for another post. However, regardless of the answer, people still strive to get a higher Google page rank. People often buy high page rank links with this as their primary goal.

Getting Indexed Quickly

Some web site owners buy high page rank links for a short period of time just to get a new site indexed.

Improving Search Engine Ranking

The search engines place a high weight on how many and what kind of links point to your pages. Webmasters looking for a fast and easy way to get better rankings often buy text links. The best effect is obtained when they buy contextual links instead of buying links that are in a list on the sidebar.

Getting More Direct Traffic

Advertising is actually a form of link buying with the motivation of getting traffic from the ad itself instead of for the SEO effects of the link.

With each of the above goals there are risks. Google does not like paid links and they have been known to slap those who buy links. if you buy high page rank links and don’t have a lot of natural high page rank links you may get Google slapped. Google usually slaps you by stripping their page rank. However, they may also totally de-index your site.

If you just buy a few links for getting indexed quickly or improving your ranking and don’t appear to be trying to manipulate your page rank you are probably pretty safe.

Even if Google doesn’t penalize your site when you buy one way links there is another big disadvantage …

It is pretty expensive to buy links and most site owners can’t afford to pay month after month. When they stop paying the links disappear. If the paid links were a significant portion of the total links that can be bad news.

I have personally decided to not buy links, but I do use some services that allow me to place my own links within posts on a number of blogs. With these services your links don’t vanish if you decide to drop your membership. These services are much more affordable than buying links and much less risky for the webmaster.

Of the one way link services I have used, there are only two that I maintain a membership with and recommend to others. The more lower cost service is 1waylinks and it is worth the investment for anyone that wants to increase search engine rankings.

I’ll clue you in in another post on the other service which is considerably more expensive but worth it if you have a lot of sites to promote and are already making money.

Both of these services can get you to the front pages of the search results and you don’t need to buy one way links and take on the expense and risks that comes when you buy links.