link building software

[newreality]

Can anyone give recommendations for link building software. By this I mean locating potential links/maintaining links (not a site interface/page directory/link farm or broker)

- searches for quality links
- gives status of existing links (still connected/moved/ended?)
- extracts contact info for potential links
- for use with multiple sites

I've been using excel in my own format so far, but I need to become more efficient given the time and effort constraints.

I'm looking into Optilink and Arelis.

There seems to be basic asssumption by some of the developers that put out this software (not necessarily these two) that outbound links don't matter for PR value. I'm not convinced this is true. I

Is this type of software detectabale by the major search engines?

[WorldCountries]

I like ReciprocalManager because you can use it on all of your sites for one license, but dealing all the bozos with PR0 pages is a pain in the proverbial. It also takes way too much time to police the links directory. One of my sites went from PR6 to PR5 because almost 50% of these people had dropped my links for no reason at all. I still maintain a listing in several link exchange directories and accept reciprocal links, but my conditions are that if my link can't be found on a reciprocal bot check, moves, or so much as wiggles that site is gone, and, no, I don't even send an email or ask what happened. I have about 100 reliable link partners now and am grateful for every one of them. But you can spend 8 hours a day exchanging emails and dealing with this nonsense. Also, how come some of these sites have literally thousands of links in their directories and a PR or 4 or 5? Google apparently really does devalue reciprocal links a bit.

On the other hand, making a few wise 1-way in bound link purchases is one of the best things you can do for your site if you are in a highly competitive field. If you are going for "wireless guages" or "Tyler, Texas CPA" no need to spend a penny. But the top 10 players in things like "hotel reservations" or "airline tickets" didn't get there by having a links directory or sitting back and waiting for people to link to them "naturally". They invested heavily in advertising, just as you would a brick-and-mortar business. I know because from time to time some very well known sites on the Internet have purchased links from me even when they already had 100,000 or more...

Someone said .edu links are great to get, and that's true. Yahoo and Google both slurp them up, although Google at a much more discriminating rate. Sitewides from from newspapers are good because they number keeps growing as they publish new pages, but I also agree wholeheartedly that you can easily overdo this... One or two sitewide purchases, some cross linking with other high PR webmasters, and a few choice 1-way link purchases, helps a lot in getting into a competivite territory.

Link brokers throw a lot of crap at you in order to make money, but they throw a few jewels out there now and then also. I just got links on a six page PR6 and 5 article at HowStuffWorks.com for only $50 a month and three PR7 links and sitewides on a PR6 site for $299 a quarter. The auctions can be equally good at times, although, once again, you wade through a lot of junk offers to find the good ones. But once again, if you don't need to compete in a competive category, or if you have no interest in achieving PR and selling advertising yourself, why spend the money?

[newreality]

I've redeveloped a site with some heavy competition.
Now I need to bring in the links.

Yahoo - will get, for the static listing value.
Dmoz - will try, but not holding my breath.

Some of my competitors actually have tens of thousands of inbound links with no outbound to be found, period. They seem to come up with an agglomeration of related sites. One in particular is operating a couple dozen near-the-same sites.

What about affilaite links -- if "affiliate partners" place links to the site.
Do these count as recip value?

What if I want to sell links-- I also have a shopping site (lower traffic, but specialized shopping categories) a calendar site (about 1000 page views/day) and a shoe site (low traffic). Where's a good place to broker the links?

It's either that or try for banner or google adwords to generate some revenue.
Was wondering if checking into Vonage would be worth it for the $20 or $25 per they promise.

I do like the traffic that articles can bring but you can be in for a wait.

One article took 9 mos to reach #2 on msn for 4.5 mil results. But still was worth it.

[WorldCountries]

I've redeveloped a site with some heavy competition.
Now I need to bring in the links.

Yahoo - will get, for the static listing value.
Dmoz - will try, but not holding my breath.

Some of my competitors actually have tens of thousands of inbound links with no outbound to be found, period. They seem to come up with an agglomeration of related sites. One in particular is operating a couple dozen near-the-same sites.

What about affilaite links -- if "affiliate partners" place links to the site.
Do these count as recip value?

What if I want to sell links-- I also have a shopping site (lower traffic, but specialized shopping categories) a calendar site (about 1000 page views/day) and a shoe site (low traffic). Where's a good place to broker the links?

It's either that or try for banner or google adwords to generate some revenue.
Was wondering if checking into Vonage would be worth it for the $20 or $25 per they promise.

I do like the traffic that articles can bring but you can be in for a wait.

One article took 9 mos to reach #2 on msn for 4.5 mil results. But still was worth it.

Google Adsense gets me about .15 cents a click with a 1.5 - 2.0% click through per page impression, with page impressions being about 85% of my actual page views. What can I say? It pays the rent for my place in Mexico and housekeeper and then some.

I don't know what you mean about affliate links. If you really like the program you can send in a testimonial and sometimes they will publish a link back to you. If you are thinking about starting your own affiliate program, what's it going to amount to unless you serve half a million pages a month and/or have something significant for someone joining and promoting your product or site? I'm not sure what you were discussing here...

If you want to sell links LinkAdage.com is a good place. Don't get greedy and sell more than 10 sitewides, and REINVEST in inbounds to make up for the PR drainage they will cause you. I'm currently paying out about $400 a month for inbounds and making about $2,200 on site wides alone across three sites. It's best to decide how many outbounds you are going to sell, publish the site with that many outbounds, and see what happens PR wise, or work up very slowly with an existing site. And if you are buyer, be darn sure to ask how many outbounds are on their pages. I closed one auction as a buyer and was apalled to discover there were 100 other outbounds like on that one PR7 page. You'd be better off having a PR5 link on a page with only 10 outbounds.

Back to Adsense for a second, at least they send down text ads and attractive image ads. There is none of this "You've Won a Digital Rebel Camera!" or "Smash the Fly with the Swatter" nonsense. I've tried half a dozen of those programs. One, I couldn't stand what I was doing to distract from the meaningful content of my pages, and, two, they don't pay anything compared to Google Adsense. Adsense is really a great program. It won't make you rich, but that steady check in the mail every month is really sweet.

Regarding the affiliate stuff, I've gone down that road more times than I can count. Now I'd say if it fits with your content perfectly, great. If not, don't bother because with 2% click-thru from your site and 1% conversion to sales from those people, you are not going to do much unless you are serving 500,000 pages a month or more. That said, the Amazon Mr. Rat Script is great, because you will get a few sales, and, believe it or not, Google actually crawls a lot of those dynamic pages and increases your saturation presence in the index. I have 2,000 actual pages on one site and almost 20,000 pages in the Google index because of the Mr. Rat Amazon product feed script. It's also showing up with 1sies and 2sies in the origin results from the search engines for 232 countries, which accounts for more than 10,000 visitors a month. (I could care less if anyone ever bought a book, but they do.)

We also have a travel insurance affiliate program going. A few bucks a quarter, but a real service to the readers. Same with Spanish lessons. Same with travel reservations. Few dollars here and here. Good for your readers. But I have to sigh when I see someone banking everything on income from some reservation engine and competing with places like Expedia.com.

Seems to me the one thing the traditionalists advocate is really true. I don't publish anything unless I have a significant body of truly helpful information to people. But if you can make a buck also selling text ads or links, why not? Neither buying nor selling advertising is unethical provided that's the secondary function of the site.

For instance, I have a friend who creates a zillion little DMOZ feeds sites with Google Ads the first thing you see on every page. It's just a big links directory from DMOZ, each with some stupid lure like "Texas Lawyers". There is nothing there about Texas lawyers. No articles. No thought. No content. Just DMOZ links to Texas lawyer sites. The man never gave a single thought to legal issues in the State of Texas, I assure you. All these sites cross link to each other to build link popularity. Yet it really doesn't amount to a hill of beans in the end in terms of revenue, after all that effort, and none of them are more than PR4. Even that tiny little empire will crumple, because it's pure SPAM.

Sorry to digress..

[Chris Boggs]

That these ideas produce income is certainly not arguable, worldcountries, but you should always preface such advice with the warning that the site could possibly be banned. That is fine, if you are willing to start anew, but I would just say when I read these kind of "schemes:" buyer beware. Good luck in your continued success. Perhaps you would care to try and (nicely) refute some of orion's ideas about such schemes in this thread (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=6616)?

[WorldCountries]

That these ideas produce income is certainly not arguable, worldcountries, but you should always preface such advice with the warning that the site could possibly be banned. That is fine, if you are willing to start anew, but I would just say when I read these kind of "schemes:" buyer beware. Good luck in your continued success. Perhaps you would care to try and (nicely) refute some of orion's ideas about such schemes in this thread (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=6616)?

There is no "scheme". There is nothing unethical about either buying or selling advertising provided that is a secondary function of the web site. I do not need to preface that fact with any warnings. And I am not afraid of being banned. Nor is it a scheme. It is a business plan. One which violates nothing in the way of ethics. My sites are travel related, and we only accept travel related links which in fact offer a service to our readers. Nor do I intend to move on and create some new spam site. Nor will I have to move on. We publish articles provided by some of the biggest governments in the world and provide a service to anyone interested in other cultures. All I have said here is that investing in your web site is a smart move if you want to compete in contested categories, and that selling advertising on your website is perfectly fine provided it does not exist solely for that purpose.

[Chris Boggs]

Worlcountries, I was simply stating that experience has taught me and others in the past that manipulation of the ranking algo's-especially linking- seem to sometime cause trouble for sites. Call it what you want , but "a zillion DMOZ feed sites" is a "scheme" in my book, and you do descibe it as being unsuccessful (which means you are descibing it as a scheme too I guess). Schemes can be good or bad. Perhaps I misunderstood your original intention, and I apologize for that. Did you read the other thread? I am curious as to your opinions on that one...

[007mike]

There is a simple answer to all of this "scheming nonsense". Write good content and distribute it, or provide valuable, original tools that people would want to link to.

If you want to build up backlinks passively you have to have something of value that people want to link to. Period.

IMO it's better to have people coming to you to get links than to chase them down, manage reciprocal links for 8 hours a day, or search through all the crap at text link auction sites. If you spent all that time researching, creating and distributing content people will start coming to you.

Obviously this takes time, you can't just snap your fingers and have an armload of articles written but eventually you will get to where you want to be if you work at it.

[agreen1125]

I have a very young website and was wondring if anyoine could share a tad-bit of information on how to do good on SERP's. I've been reading on the net and most of them suggest that I should be linking to good sites, but then now here's the catch 22, since my site is young, those sites I requested for reciprocal links only do it with sites with PR4 or higher. Are there a sites are not si expensive "paid" sites to do reciprocal links with?

Does website age really a factor in getting good placements in Google? How about with Yahoo or MSN? We do not mind using "aggressive" techniques if it will get us up there.

Thanks for your time and more power.

[TallTroll]

I hear OptiLink is pretty good. Does multi tier analysis, theme analysis etc and I think it deals with www2/3 on Google, and a few other less obvious SEs'

>> Does website age really a factor in getting good placements in Google?

Link aging can help. Find places that DON'T require recips first. Then you'll have some PR, then stupid webmasters will link to you

>> Yahoo or MSN? We do not mind using "aggressive" techniques if it will get us up there.

Who needs to be aggressive? MSN are easy enough to rank what you like with, and Yahoo aren't much harder. Pay up for a listing, make sure your on-page stuff is exact phrase match, buy in a few links - bingo

[bennytorp]

I'm looking into Optilink and Arelis.

There seems to be basic asssumption by some of the developers that put out this software (not necessarily these two) that outbound links don't matter for PR value. I'm not convinced this is true.

Take a look at LinkAssistant - they DO matter fo PR and many other things in order to provide a user with VALUABLE and RELEVANT link partners.


Is this type of software detectabale by the major search engines?

No. You just place a reciprocal links. All these programs do not leave any traces - so search engines are unable of thacking them.

[Chris Boggs]

Take a look at LinkAssistant - they DO matter fo PR and many other things in order to provide a user with VALUABLE and RELEVANT link partners...No. You just place a reciprocal links. All these programs do not leave any traces - so search engines are unable of thacking them.

Hi Beny, you should certainly preface these statements with "in my experience," or " I feel that..." You are labeling theory as hard evidence. There is no concrete proof that the Search engines are not able to track linking efforts, and as a matter of fact we know that in some cases they do. Also, Mike Grehan is fond of saying PR is nothing but "Green fairy dust." Although I do not completely discount it, feeling that it can be used as an indicator, I would not list it as the first qualification for link partners. I have found that relevancy way outweighs PR in most cases.