Comparison Strategies - Links, PPC, Advertising, Buying Link Options

[cre8pc]

With so many options to choose from nowadays, how does one decide what to choose?

Many of you use different link and advertising campaigns to get the word out about your web site (s). How do you determine the right course of action? Does budget play a part in the decision, or ease of use, or the relationship between sites (such as linking to subject related sites.)?

With the launch of the free link and advertising network system called Link Vault , there is another option. Link Vault is free, and is used to get and receive links. We've seen link exchanges before, but the emphasis was on volume, not quality. Link Vault hopes to add weight to links by matching categories and only accepting "quality" sites.

We'd like to hear some personal experience stories about how you chose your solution(s), why and what you learned. This is isn't about promoting any one company or offer (we want to avoid that angle), but more of a study in strategy and how it fits a constantly changing search engine environment.

And, ask your questions here too!

[Webby]

The whole issue of gaining domain popularity through link purchase, link exchange or through a network is getting increasingly complex as Google continues to find ways to filter out obviously paid for links, particularly from unrelated sites. It by no means stops there though. Google have new patents out which looks like they are heading the way of Teoma in that they will be looking a lot more closely at hubs and communities in order to value thematic links considerably more than links from completely unrelated sites. They even have an Adword advertisment out for "latent Semantic indexing" for a new employee to which focus on identifying pages within the same 'community' (read theme). The patent they recently publisehed also focuses on other issues...

Unnatural link growth
link churn (links that only last a short time).
unnatural site growth.
unnatural repetition of exact anchor text in incoming links.
more weighting for sites that grow naturally
less weight on pages that have not been changed for a long time
And a bunch of other really anti-spam measures.

They have the patent but they are imo a long way from implementing into their algorithm most of the above.

A wise SEO however will be looking towards the future NOW. This means take special care on link growth, make extra efforts on thematic linking anmd basically think about things that YOU wouold look out for if you were a google engineer and wanted to stamp about link spam.

Link Vault took a lot of this patent into consideration so you can build your links naturally by setting your own link growth rate, You can set up to 3 link text per link and even set the weighting they get shown and recently implemented was that you get yourlinks first from those in the same category (currently +40 categories).

For purchasing links be sure the links are going to count by checking other links on the page and if they are showing up and make a special effort to keep them thematic. Having said that, mass linking from unrelated sites still work with Google ("miserable Failure") and it could be some time before this changes. however, taking steps now for the future algo is the wise thing to do. the CTR of the links form related sites is also of course higher so it makes sense anyway.

Cheers
Alan
Excuse the typos, my wife insists I go to the garden NOW and dont have time to check through. :-)

[chinese]

I have paid a little visit to your site. what's the difference with the coop network from digital point?

[randfish]

Link Vault doesn't rotate links - so it's also valuable for Google (who specifically penalizes links that rotate on and off web pages).

There's other things too, like the vetting of content, partners available, code, time, etc.

[Webby]

It doesnt stop there either,
LV is also now gining priority to links being set on the same category (thematic linking), You have 3 keyword choices per link that you can weight, you can add links at a set rate rather than all at once, with referals you get access to some valuaböe stats (where links placed (from and to), increas in links to an additional 30...

The gap between the two as far as features are consered is growing by every update.

Alan

[AdamRivard]

Link Vault does does focus on volume rather than quality but this is unavoidable in this industry. Webmasters don't have time to be emailing people and spending half of there day organizing link exhanges. Bulk is much better in my opinion because although your ranking may not be as high you are getting much more traffic and your conversion rate will hopefully increase. We have had recent complaints about the countless hours wasted taking part in link exhanges within our forums and we came to the conclusion that if you have the time to get quality traffic then by all means do it but bulk traffic is much easier. Most online businesses should be more concerned with consumer satisfaction rather than linking to there pages. In response to the poor linking methods on the interent we are trying to create a meeting place for people within our site called a Link Chain. It was released today. [url removed by administrator] Althought this way of recieveing links and the many others similar to it provide bulk with a lack of quality. You have to think to yourself:

Do I want to sacrifice customer relations for a link to some site no one will visit anyways?????

[Webby]

LV is in placing links on sites in the same theme, however, there are of course only so many sites per theme. And the fact remains that CURRENTLY quantity of links clearly works on Google for high rankings. Google is not thematic yet but it coming. As Link Vault grows so of course will the number of sites per theme. if you are selling waterbeds though you may well find that you are the only one in the network doing so. But your competitors are of course in the same boat so quantity of links is what makes the difference between you and your competitors.

As membership grows though more at least broadly themed links are being placed first, followed by links from non-thematic sites.

Alan