Ask John Smiley

A new link building service called NextGenLinks promises to be the next best thing in improving your sites ranking in the search engines. The new service provides contextual deep linking to every page on your site which is very different from many other similar services that only link to the home page. This is much better for SEO and looks much more natural to search engines so you avoid the over-optimization penalties.

The new NextGenLinks service allows you a complete level of control over every link you both receive and send to others in the system. Outbound links from each page are limited to five to prevent too much pagerank leaving your pages. You can also automate the inbound link building which is the default if you do not want to control who links to you.

One problem I had was their spider did not discover all the pages on my website. Not sure where the bug is, but since the URL’s are uploaded using a CSV file it was easy enough to make my own list. I’m sure the minor issues will be ironed out in time.

The customer service and interaction I have observed from the owner Charles Kassotis has been excellent so far. From what I saw he replies quickly and answers people questions. I have not had the chance to test the rest of his Help Desk yet.

After joining you simply need to add a domain, add a small snippet of code, spider and upload a CSV file of all your URL’s, and then just wait for contextual backlinks to come in. A easy and fast system considering all thing, though the links did seem to be added not so quickly, but I’m sure that will improve as more users are added to the potential list of link partners.

I have hopes NextGenLinks will only continue to improve in the future yet am pleased with what I see from it so far. Deep link building is the way of the future because it is so close to natural link building that Google, Yahoo, and MSN will love it.

I have done a lot of research on this subject. I have tried for years to just get one site I build visible to people searching in the Google index. When I studied Search Engine Optimization back at the start of the internet, the key was apparently Meta Tags. I started by slamming my pages with meta tags. Making sure my code was just a step better than the competition. I looked at sites ranking toward the top and I was astounded at what I found their keywords to be. Reputable businesses had meta keywords like Free XXX, Nudity, etc. Why? Because it that day these were big search terms, even though not related to their business, they wanted to pull any free traffic they good. One specific one selling contact lenses had stuffed their keywords with all kinds of crazy things. But they were ranking number 1. As you can imagine, I duplicated everything I could in their code I waited months, and I was never ranked anywhere.

The next thing I noticed is that all sites in a great position had thousands of pages in the Google index. The problem with this is many of my sites are simple sales pages, and I can’t create that much content. I then stumbled across Traffic Booster Pro. This program seemed fantastic. I would generate unique content pages for a site and show them to a search engine, but then redirect the users to my website. I used this and it worked very well until Google crawled my site so much it crashed my data center. My rankings instantly disappeared, and even after the site was back up, and I scaled back the amount Google crawled. My rankings never reappeared. I had be penalized by Google for all the generated content. This was a short lived method to get some traffic and I spent 100 bucks on it.

I studied some Guru’s and they said link exchanges were effective. The more links the better. I joined a site called Linkmarket.net and set up my page to exchange links. This is worthless, 400 links later I didn’t see a change in rankings. I decided to see if the Guru’s were really using this strategy. I go on their websites and they have no partner directories or instructions on exchanging links. They already know this is ineffective. I again so no results from this action. Links do help though. A search for click here on Google leads to a result of number one for Adobe. Best part is Adobe doesn’t have the words click here anywhere on the page. Links work, just not exchanged links.

So to answer the question, no link exchanging does nothing for SEO. The two ways to get your sites link that are not exchanges you can share information or make link bait. The article that you are reading right now helps my rankings. I just write experiences and information that I have retained in knowledge, the distribute it to webmasters to update content on their site. This helps the webmasters by making Google visit their site often since they are constantly adding content. Best part is when they like and add my content they add a link to my site. I write articles several times a day about different things that relate to my website. This is how I get links to my site, without exchanging them. I exchange information of a one-way text link.

There are two ways. Link bait, and content sharing. Link bait is like the chicken website that Burger King built. I don’t know if you ever saw it, but it was a dude dressed up in a chicken suit dancing around and crap. It ranked them number one on Google for the broadest phrase you could think of. Chicken. The drawback to link bait is you have to be extremely creative to get something built that people actually want to link to. Or you can pay an expert in this field thousands to create link bait for your site. There are better ways.

Content sharing is exactly what you are looking at. I published this informational article for webmasters to add to their site. If people like it several website will publish it. A SEO site trying to provide free advice my put this article online. This helps them because if they constantly add content Google will spider frequently. This can help them if they make a change to their site, to have it updated in the index quickly. The catch is to use the content that I write they have to include my resource box. The resource box talks about me and then gives me a link to a site that I want. I submit a bunch of free content to the directories where webmasters go find it. When they find it an publish it I get a link back to my site. The best part is even if a webmaster doesn’t publish my article the directories they go for publish my article and that creates links. I don’t link out on my site at all. I do have meta tags, but they don’t really do much. I also only have a 3 page website and it still ranks nicely.

To conclude it won’t hurt to have a well coded big site, but that is not what pulls rankings. The best rankings I ever obtained are from submitting articles. I love to write the different articles and share information or knowledge I have for free. Also Google can tell that I am manually writing these because there is no duplicate information in them across the network. So they know that I am not trying to steal rankings, that I am providing legit information and a link to my site. This causes each link to have a nice weight with google. My job has become to promote my website through distributing information.