Obnoxious Links: The Key for Web Site Ranking
Obnoxious links. They really are, that is until they are fully applied. After that, the search engines are using them as an important measuring rod to rank a site, because if a particular site has a lot of reciprocal links, with those that are in the same field, what that translates into is the site has the authority in the field that it is involved in. However, why would sites that are doing the same business link with each other? They could virtually end up driving business to the other’s site instead of keeping the traffic that came to their site and make them buy.
Lately, some webmaster suggested that the best way to garner links is by studying sites that are getting the top spot with the same keywords a webmaster is using, and find a way to link to those sites or harvest links from those sites. When the search engines encounter similarities, it will force them to improve the rank they give to such sites in their search results. It is easy to put a link of a popular site or a news portal on a site, but getting a reciprocal link could be difficult, even impossible at times, because some sites are very choosy, they look at the rank of a site, and some trade their links. In fact, there are sites known as “Value Links”, and what they do is sell reciprocal link lists by the thousands. Those who can spend money, in spite of what they are doing could end at the top, and stay there.
What does not make sense is, why would two competitors link with each other and promote each other’s business? It could be good for the consumers, because they will easily find out who the competitors are, and they can compare price, quality of product and service, and the one that meets their requirement most will get their business. A competitor who closes a deal with this kind of arrangement could pick it through a link put on another competitor’s site, and if not for that, the original site would have been the one that would have closed the deal. Some sites could end up being bridges for their competitors that carry the same product and service, but that might have a lot of appeal, because of bells and whistles, and not only that numerous assumptions could be made why buyers might not want to go back to the original site. It might not have anything to do with significant differences. It could be as simple as losing the original site or to save time, as everyone is strapped for time. There is of course a way to get around this problem and it has to do with how you choose your links; you have to do it without hamstringing your business.
They could have had the consumer in the back of their mind without their knowing it when they came up with this kind of evaluating mechanism, because it is the customers who wring more out of it. Yet, it does have some relevance, because unless what it takes is there, it does not instigate a reciprocal action, the key ingredient search engines might be looking at, and in spite of it all, there should have been other ways to rank sites. Nevertheless, link exchange is creating a lot of buzz and commotion as everyone is scurrying to build their link popularity in order not to be left behind, and through the email exchange alone, many lucrative deals might have taken place, because it gives webmasters a chance to talk about what they are doing.
A good number of indexes like the “Yahoo Index” for example and “business.com”, which charge money to index a site, no matter what the site’s content is, could be used as a measuring rod. In fact they are being used so, because being in the Yahoo Index improves the rank of sites. This brings to light that good links have money value and they are bought and sold in the open market, as there are sites that are offering their links for sale. There are a few open source indexes like the “Open Directory Project” for example, which used to be helpful for getting indexed, because every site will be revised before it is accepted, and that should signal to the search engines that the site is worthy of its salt. The other one “joeant.com” is easy to join, although there is a small onetime fee, and is worth it to be in their index as it helps with the search engine ranking.
Somehow, it is seems that links might not be the best measuring rod because they could give the edge to the competitors, and marketers might refrain from using them. There is the possibility of sending away buying prospects as well as introducing would be prospects to other alternative sources, which otherwise might have stayed in the dark. However, avoiding direct competitors would do the trick, since there are others to link with who are doing a different aspect of the same field, which makes them ideal for linking.
Most probably that is why RSS is trying to replace reciprocal links by introducing power linking and more incoming links that point at a site. The catch is since RSS has different approaches, one aspect of it can be put on an auto-pilot, that is if the webmasters do not put their own content on their Web site, and search engines might have a way of telling the difference, otherwise it will not qualify as the best measuring rod.
All it takes is to make arrangements with news portals that are syndicating their news feed to send their content to a particular site whenever they make changes, which could be on a daily basis, and the theme of the subject should be similar with what the site is doing, as any news feed will not work, because it will fail the relevance test the spiders apply. Once that is in place, it will create a new content on the targeted Web site on an ongoing basis, and that will make the spiders come for a visit, possibly everyday, and it will definitely help with the ranking.
There are sites like www.PubSub.com for example that will accomplish this. All it takes is to add their PubSub sidebar on a browser, supply them with what the webmaster is looking for, and everything that has to do with what the site is doing will be delivered to the web browser.
Moreover, this function can also be accomplished by adding an RSS reader on a site as there are a number of them to download, and whenever there is a visit to a site that has relevance to what a particular site is doing, it is possible to see the orange XML icon, which is an indication that there is RSS feed. By clicking on the orange XML icon it is possible to obtain a URL that need to be added to the RSS reader on the webmaster’s site and whenever there is a content change it will be downloaded to the particular site. If it has relevance to what the site is doing it will serve as a fresh content that will attract spiders to the site, and this technique is proven to work as we read this article. That is why it is an ongoing battle to say on top of search engines’ result, because that is the only way to get traffic.
