Ok, so, yes things evolve, peopel get smarter, people get older, people gain knowledge, computers get faster, bigger screens, bigger faster processers, more websites, better phones, bigger homes, faster cars, cooler everything.. It seems everything evolves.
BUT
People never like to be wronged or rejected, People still breathe air, the heart is still required to live, humans still walk on their feet and not their hands.
Excerpt: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ECC%201
My point? There are some underlying things in the world of SEO that have not changed and will never change. So, stick with them and you’ll be safe. Yes, in order to really, really ‘grow’ you have to experiment and take a risk, but dont ever do this while neglecting the basics. This I have found is a critical mistake people, including myself, make. We get so pumped with the lastest link sculpting method we forget to send a few emails out to potential link partners for a legitimate link or two. Why? Because its boring. But many things in life that may seem boring are critical to life. Example: Brushing your teeth, going to pee, breathing.
Take breathing for example: What if someon told you to do something every day 17,280 times each day, every day for the rest of your life an dit was the same thing over and over? That would suck wouldnt it.
However, if you choose to cut that down just by 10%, you’ll be dead in a day. That would suck too.
So, what are these basics, or ‘tricks’ people might think.
First, stick to a plan. Got an idea for a website? - Do it. Finish it. Make it live with all its features. Grit your teeth and make it happen, no matter what.
This is a genius saying I know but here it goes: “You wont do anything if you dont do anything”
Very simple but how true. How many ‘great’ ideas do you have but never implement any of them.
A friend of mind pointed out recently that 80% of the fuel on the Space Shuttle is simply used to extend beyond orbit and the remaining mission relies on the 20% remaining. That is what its like starting a business, blog or putting an idea into reality. It takes 80% of your efforts just to get it off the ground as compared to then running the business, following systems etc.
So, tip for the day is. Take all the things you have going on in your head. Pick one. Do it until the imagination of it in your head is a reality.
What is PageRank Good for Anyway? Get PR
A couple of months ago, SEOmoz explored the relationship between a web page's PageRank and its position in search results. They concluded:
Google's PageRank is, indeed, slightly correlated with their rankings (as well as with the rankings of other major search engines). However, other page-level metrics are dramatically better, including link counts from Yahoo and Page Authority.
I was intrigued by the study, and vowed to investigate the metric using my own data set. Because all of my data are at the root domain level, I chose to focus on the homepage PageRank of each domain.
Methods
I averaged three months of data (November, 2009 - January, 2010), collected on the last day of each month for 1,316 root domains. Using Quantcast Media Planner, I selected websites that had chosen to make their traffic data public. To be included, websites had to have an average of at least 100,000 unique US visitors during this time period.
The domains selected for this study do not approximate a random sample of websites. Because of the way in which they were selected, they will bias in favor of sites with many US visitors, and against sites with very few. There may also be differences between Quantified sites with public traffic data, and non-Quantified websites. For example, Quantified domains are probably more likely to include advertising on their pages than sites without the Quantcast script.
PageRank
PageRank (PR) can only take eleven values (0-10). It is an ordinal variable meaning that the difference between PR = 8 and PR = 9 is not the same as the difference between PR = 3 and PR = 4. Like mozRank, it probably exists on a log scale.
The median and mode PageRank among websites in this study were PR = 6, with a minimum of PR = 0, and a maximum of PR = 9. However, only ten websites had PR < 3, and only seven had PR = 9.
Results
SEOmoz Metrics
Using Spearman's correlation coefficient, I compared PageRank to several SEOmoz root domain metrics. Domain mozRank (linearized) was strongly correlated with PR (r = 0.62)*. This correlation was somewhat smaller than the 0.71 that SEOmoz reported in May, 2009. The disparity may be due to differences in methodology; SEOmoz used Pearson's correlation coefficient, and did not linearize mozRank. Additionally, PR data in my study were probably measured over a smaller range of values, potentially weakening the observed dependencies.
*All reported correlations are significant at p < .01.
MozTrust was also highly correlated with PageRank (r = .62), with Domain Authority somewhat less-so (r = .55). The latter has since undergone some major changes, and this result may not reflect the metric as it exists today.
Search Engine Indexing
I performed [site:example.com] queries using Google, Yahoo, and Bing APIs to approximate the number of pages indexed by each search engine. Much to my surprise, PageRank shared the strongest correlation with the number of pages indexed by Bing (r = .52), instead of Google (r = .30), or Yahoo (r = .24). My first thought was that Google might not have reported accurate counts, a phenomenon often noted by SEO professionals. However, there is some evidence that may indicate otherwise.
If Google's reported indexation numbers are inaccurate, we would expect the metric to have lower correlations with similar metrics. However, indexation numbers reported by Google and Yahoo share a fairly high Pearson's correlation coefficient (r = 0.38). Both appear to share smaller correlations with Bing: 0.34, and 0.26 respectively. Even more interesting, SEOmoz metrics seem to have much stronger correlations with Bing's indexed pages than the numbers reported by Google or Yahoo.
If Google is failing to accurately report the size of its index, we might expect that similar queries would also return inaccurate data. However, PageRank shares a high Spearman's correlation coefficient with the number of results returned by a Google [link:example.com] query (r = 0.65). The strength of this relationship appears similar to those between SEOmoz metrics and PR mentioned earlier. PR's correlation with the results of a Yahoo [linkdomain:example.com -site:example.com] query is somewhat smaller (r = 0.53).
If the number of pages Google reports having indexed is a relatively poor metric, we would also expect to find more variation between months than other search engines. However, I did not find this to be the case. In fact, Bing had by far the highest average percent change in the number of pages indexed, a whopping 355% increase per month. Google averaged an increase of 61%, and Yahoo an increase of only 2%.
While it is still possible that the number of pages on each domain that Google reports to have indexed is inaccurate, I see another potential explanation. Moreso than Yahoo or Google, the number of pages that Bing will index on any given domain is related to the quantity and quality of links to that domain. Perhaps, at least when it comes to indexation, Bing follows more of a traditional PageRank-like algorithm. After all, Google claims that PR is only one of more than 200 signals used for ranking pages. This theory is supported by the results of SEOmoz's comparison of Google's and Bing's ranking factors.
Social Media
PageRank even shares fairly strong correlations with social media metric such as how many of a domain's pages are saved on Delicious (r = 0.49), how many stories it has on Digg (r = 0.38), and even the number of Tweets linking to one of its pages as measured by Topsy (r = .38).
Website Traffic
Last, but certainly not least, PageRank predicts website traffic with somewhat surprising strength. As reported by Quantcast, monthly page views, visits, and unique visitors are all significantly correlated with PR. Google's little green bar even correlates with visits per unique visitor (r = 0.18), but not page views per visit. However, putting this in context shows the value of a metric like Domain Authority.
Discussion
So what exactly does all of this mean, and why is it important?
First, despite being a page-level metric, homepage PageRank is actually a fairly good predictor of many important domain-level variables relevant to SEO, social media, and website traffic.
For instance, on average, websites with a PR = 7 homepage had 2.6 times as many unique visitors as those with a PR = 6 homepage, which in turn had 1.5 times as many unique visitors as those with a PR = 5 homepage.
Second, homepage PageRank is sometimes used as a proxy for a hypothetical “domain PageRank.” While technically inaccurate, this study supports the idea that the PR of a website's homepage provides information about the domain as a whole.
While it may be limited to just eleven possible values, PR it is surprisingly good at predicting the relative number of inbound links to a domain reported by Google and Yahoo, as well as the relative number of pages indexed by Bing. The key word here is “relative.” As an ordinal variable, PR cannot be used to predict the actual values of continuous variables.
Finally, this study provides evidence that SEOmoz's domain-level metrics may be good (and possibly better than PageRank) predictors of variables important to search, social media, and web analytics. This, as well as all of the results of this study should be interpreted within the context of the included domains (high-traffic, US-centric, and publicly Quantified).
I hope you enjoyed reading my post, because I certainly enjoyed writing it. I intend to write many more based on your feedback.
Google's PageRank is, indeed, slightly correlated with their rankings (as well as with the rankings of other major search engines). However, other page-level metrics are dramatically better, including link counts from Yahoo and Page Authority.
I was intrigued by the study, and vowed to investigate the metric using my own data set. Because all of my data are at the root domain level, I chose to focus on the homepage PageRank of each domain.
Methods
I averaged three months of data (November, 2009 - January, 2010), collected on the last day of each month for 1,316 root domains. Using Quantcast Media Planner, I selected websites that had chosen to make their traffic data public. To be included, websites had to have an average of at least 100,000 unique US visitors during this time period.
The domains selected for this study do not approximate a random sample of websites. Because of the way in which they were selected, they will bias in favor of sites with many US visitors, and against sites with very few. There may also be differences between Quantified sites with public traffic data, and non-Quantified websites. For example, Quantified domains are probably more likely to include advertising on their pages than sites without the Quantcast script.
PageRank
PageRank (PR) can only take eleven values (0-10). It is an ordinal variable meaning that the difference between PR = 8 and PR = 9 is not the same as the difference between PR = 3 and PR = 4. Like mozRank, it probably exists on a log scale.
The median and mode PageRank among websites in this study were PR = 6, with a minimum of PR = 0, and a maximum of PR = 9. However, only ten websites had PR < 3, and only seven had PR = 9.
Results
SEOmoz Metrics
Using Spearman's correlation coefficient, I compared PageRank to several SEOmoz root domain metrics. Domain mozRank (linearized) was strongly correlated with PR (r = 0.62)*. This correlation was somewhat smaller than the 0.71 that SEOmoz reported in May, 2009. The disparity may be due to differences in methodology; SEOmoz used Pearson's correlation coefficient, and did not linearize mozRank. Additionally, PR data in my study were probably measured over a smaller range of values, potentially weakening the observed dependencies.
*All reported correlations are significant at p < .01.
MozTrust was also highly correlated with PageRank (r = .62), with Domain Authority somewhat less-so (r = .55). The latter has since undergone some major changes, and this result may not reflect the metric as it exists today.
Search Engine Indexing
I performed [site:example.com] queries using Google, Yahoo, and Bing APIs to approximate the number of pages indexed by each search engine. Much to my surprise, PageRank shared the strongest correlation with the number of pages indexed by Bing (r = .52), instead of Google (r = .30), or Yahoo (r = .24). My first thought was that Google might not have reported accurate counts, a phenomenon often noted by SEO professionals. However, there is some evidence that may indicate otherwise.
If Google's reported indexation numbers are inaccurate, we would expect the metric to have lower correlations with similar metrics. However, indexation numbers reported by Google and Yahoo share a fairly high Pearson's correlation coefficient (r = 0.38). Both appear to share smaller correlations with Bing: 0.34, and 0.26 respectively. Even more interesting, SEOmoz metrics seem to have much stronger correlations with Bing's indexed pages than the numbers reported by Google or Yahoo.
If Google is failing to accurately report the size of its index, we might expect that similar queries would also return inaccurate data. However, PageRank shares a high Spearman's correlation coefficient with the number of results returned by a Google [link:example.com] query (r = 0.65). The strength of this relationship appears similar to those between SEOmoz metrics and PR mentioned earlier. PR's correlation with the results of a Yahoo [linkdomain:example.com -site:example.com] query is somewhat smaller (r = 0.53).
If the number of pages Google reports having indexed is a relatively poor metric, we would also expect to find more variation between months than other search engines. However, I did not find this to be the case. In fact, Bing had by far the highest average percent change in the number of pages indexed, a whopping 355% increase per month. Google averaged an increase of 61%, and Yahoo an increase of only 2%.
While it is still possible that the number of pages on each domain that Google reports to have indexed is inaccurate, I see another potential explanation. Moreso than Yahoo or Google, the number of pages that Bing will index on any given domain is related to the quantity and quality of links to that domain. Perhaps, at least when it comes to indexation, Bing follows more of a traditional PageRank-like algorithm. After all, Google claims that PR is only one of more than 200 signals used for ranking pages. This theory is supported by the results of SEOmoz's comparison of Google's and Bing's ranking factors.
Social Media
PageRank even shares fairly strong correlations with social media metric such as how many of a domain's pages are saved on Delicious (r = 0.49), how many stories it has on Digg (r = 0.38), and even the number of Tweets linking to one of its pages as measured by Topsy (r = .38).
Website Traffic
Last, but certainly not least, PageRank predicts website traffic with somewhat surprising strength. As reported by Quantcast, monthly page views, visits, and unique visitors are all significantly correlated with PR. Google's little green bar even correlates with visits per unique visitor (r = 0.18), but not page views per visit. However, putting this in context shows the value of a metric like Domain Authority.
Discussion
So what exactly does all of this mean, and why is it important?
First, despite being a page-level metric, homepage PageRank is actually a fairly good predictor of many important domain-level variables relevant to SEO, social media, and website traffic.
For instance, on average, websites with a PR = 7 homepage had 2.6 times as many unique visitors as those with a PR = 6 homepage, which in turn had 1.5 times as many unique visitors as those with a PR = 5 homepage.
Second, homepage PageRank is sometimes used as a proxy for a hypothetical “domain PageRank.” While technically inaccurate, this study supports the idea that the PR of a website's homepage provides information about the domain as a whole.
While it may be limited to just eleven possible values, PR it is surprisingly good at predicting the relative number of inbound links to a domain reported by Google and Yahoo, as well as the relative number of pages indexed by Bing. The key word here is “relative.” As an ordinal variable, PR cannot be used to predict the actual values of continuous variables.
Finally, this study provides evidence that SEOmoz's domain-level metrics may be good (and possibly better than PageRank) predictors of variables important to search, social media, and web analytics. This, as well as all of the results of this study should be interpreted within the context of the included domains (high-traffic, US-centric, and publicly Quantified).
I hope you enjoyed reading my post, because I certainly enjoyed writing it. I intend to write many more based on your feedback.
I Really Love Link Building - And You Should Too!
Link building is always a hot topic because it is really what makes an SEO campaign work. Content is important, page and link structure are important, and the url is important, but for competitive search terms, great on-site optimization will only get you so far. I have had a bit of a love/hate relationship with link building over the years, and I have really started to be a lot more analytical in how I go about building incoming links.
This love story begins at the beginning of 2006. I was diagnosed with a terminal cancer, but prayerfully enough it turned out to be a large non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma tumor which was treatable. For over six months, I was stuck in a chair and didn't have the energy to get up an do anything so I spent that time teaching myself about websites and marketing. I started reading SEO blogs (like SEOmoz and others) to learn what I could. I figured I might as well put the time to use, right?
Over the coming months, I started my first SEO campaign for my newly built car accessories website. My target keywords were stupidly competitive - car accessories and aftermarket auto parts and a lot more keywords like them. I figured if SEO really worked, then I could do it. I could get ranked for some ridiculously competitive keywords.
I had a good understanding of on-site SEO such as titles, meta tags, content, URLs, and link structure so I built the site to be highly optimized for my keywords. I found creative ways to get a lot of content on the homepage using ajax and javascript tabs but still keeping the website aesthetically pleasing. Once the changes were indexed, I made sure that the content in the tabs was indexing properly. After trying some long tail queries, I found my site's tabbed content was indexed very well.
The on-site SEO bumped the rankings into the top 100 for car accessories. It had previously been ranked around 350 or so. With everything I had done to beef up the on-site SEO, it was still a long way from where I wanted it. That's when I started the link building process. In 2006 I found a lot of info about directory submissions, article marketing, reciprocal linking, buying links, DMOZ, and blogging so I did a little bit of everything. A little of everything turned into a lot of everything over the next six months, and slowly but surely the rankings began to rise.
The directory submission process was done with a combination of manual submissions, semi-automated submissions using software, and even some automated submissions. I used a few directory submitters plus doing a simple Google search for relevant directories and submitted to any and all that didn't require a payment. During this process I also started writing how-to articles and submitting them to article directories, blogs, online magazines and journals. After a few months, the site made it to the first page and traffic started coming in.
Not long after that I started getting reciprocal link requests, so I exchanged a few links along with way as well. As traffic picked up, I started getting sales on the website for the first time and my attention was being directed towards sales and customer service instead of SEO. For about a year, I didn't do any marketing on the site except write a few articles and syndicate to whoever would publish them. Sometime in 2008, I checked the rankings and found this.
It had climbed to #1 out of 92,100,000 results. I could not believe it. Traffic was up over 1000%, and the site was getting literally thousands of unique visitors a month just from this keyword. I checked the analytics and traffic was up and down and all over the place. After monitoring this for a few days, I experienced the "Google Dance" with rankings ranging from #1 to #4. Surprisingly, traffic amounts from positions 2-4 were not even HALF of the amount generated from position #1.
Jump ahead to June 2010. The website is ranking between #2 and #5 from day to day for car accessories. The surprising thing about this case study is that there hasn't been any additional marketing done to the site since around November 2008. Even with the low quality nature of directories, article directories, and even some reciprocal incoming links, the ranking has stayed top 5 for a really competitive keyword. I did take the time to get the website listed in DMOZ, the Google Directory, and a lot of other "good" websites. Some of the syndicated articles landed on sites like DIY, ehow.com, and other car enthusiasts websites generating some great inbound links. The site doesn't get credit for a lot of the low quality links that were acquired early on but I did do a few things right that had some great results.
I mentioned earlier that I am taking a more analytical approach to link building, and after reading a lot of articles, seeing this video about article marketing, and getting a better understanding of how much better Google is at identifying low quality links and websites, I have really changed the way I think about link building. Much like in the world of content, quality is better than quantity when it comes to obtaining links. After analyzing my own link building path from 2006 until the present, I came up with a list of best practices to guide my link building moving forward:
It is well worth the time to write great content as opposed to lots of decent content. Some of the best articles I wrote are the ones that attracted the most links and landed on good websites, and one or two were even highlighted in a breaking news story that brought a LOT of referral traffic while it was on the site's homepage.
If you figure out something cool or unique, like getting Pandora to play through a mono bluetooth headset, write about it and keep the content on your site and create a buzz using social media. Links will surely come.
Write content for your own site first. As Rand points out, you will get the links pointing back at your site for having the original content.
Here is one of my favorites - syndicate your RSS feed, not your article content. This is a philosophical change to the approach I used to have in article marketing. Instead of publishing your duplicate content everywhere, keep the content on your site and ping services like technorati, twitter, facebook, and anywhere you can publish your site's feed. Get visitors on your site and then give them an opportunity to bookmark or share your content via social media.
Quality directories are still valid. I have still seen good success from getting listed in the top human-edited directories, especially local and regional ones. Avoid the free-for-all sites and focus on the ones that add value to users.
Guest Blogging is a new hot-topic which is also worth doing. As Rand mentioned in this weeks WBF video, finding relevant websites to post content to is a good way to get quality inbound links and brand awareness. In many cases, you can get content for your site as well if you establish a good partnership with a complementary website or blog.
Patience is a virtue. It is hard to not check rankings every day, but there are a lot of other things to do with your valuable time than checking rankings. I schedule a time once a week to check up on how things are progressing. This keeps me from wasting time each day, and gives me a reason to measure results and dive into analytics at the end of the week.
Reciprocal links are not all bad. It is natural for complementary websites to link to one another, so the emphasis is on relevance. I will exchange links with relevant and complementary websites, but not with just any site. You want to make sure you are linking to reputable websites too.
Don't Spam. Search engines (like Google) mostly update their algorithms to do one of two things: to increase the relevance of the search results and to battle spam in their index. If you keep things relevant and avoid spam tactics, your rankings should remain intact as long as their isn't a fundamental shift in how websites and pages are ranked. Up until the recent "May Day" update, all of our sites have actually improved over the past few years with Google updates (The May Day update gave us about a 14% drop in the number of indexed pages, much like with SEOmoz and others).
Four years later, I have a much different approach to marketing, a different approach to life, and a lot of sites doing well in the search results. Marketing gives me an outlet for my competitive edge which is why I tend to climb the keyword mountains that I do. I would like to hear how your link building tactics have changed over the years and see how far we have come. I plan to keep a student's approach SEO, which continues to prove itself as one of the most frustrating, rewarding, and elusive things in life. It is (after all) a love story!
This love story begins at the beginning of 2006. I was diagnosed with a terminal cancer, but prayerfully enough it turned out to be a large non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma tumor which was treatable. For over six months, I was stuck in a chair and didn't have the energy to get up an do anything so I spent that time teaching myself about websites and marketing. I started reading SEO blogs (like SEOmoz and others) to learn what I could. I figured I might as well put the time to use, right?
Over the coming months, I started my first SEO campaign for my newly built car accessories website. My target keywords were stupidly competitive - car accessories and aftermarket auto parts and a lot more keywords like them. I figured if SEO really worked, then I could do it. I could get ranked for some ridiculously competitive keywords.
I had a good understanding of on-site SEO such as titles, meta tags, content, URLs, and link structure so I built the site to be highly optimized for my keywords. I found creative ways to get a lot of content on the homepage using ajax and javascript tabs but still keeping the website aesthetically pleasing. Once the changes were indexed, I made sure that the content in the tabs was indexing properly. After trying some long tail queries, I found my site's tabbed content was indexed very well.
The on-site SEO bumped the rankings into the top 100 for car accessories. It had previously been ranked around 350 or so. With everything I had done to beef up the on-site SEO, it was still a long way from where I wanted it. That's when I started the link building process. In 2006 I found a lot of info about directory submissions, article marketing, reciprocal linking, buying links, DMOZ, and blogging so I did a little bit of everything. A little of everything turned into a lot of everything over the next six months, and slowly but surely the rankings began to rise.
The directory submission process was done with a combination of manual submissions, semi-automated submissions using software, and even some automated submissions. I used a few directory submitters plus doing a simple Google search for relevant directories and submitted to any and all that didn't require a payment. During this process I also started writing how-to articles and submitting them to article directories, blogs, online magazines and journals. After a few months, the site made it to the first page and traffic started coming in.
Not long after that I started getting reciprocal link requests, so I exchanged a few links along with way as well. As traffic picked up, I started getting sales on the website for the first time and my attention was being directed towards sales and customer service instead of SEO. For about a year, I didn't do any marketing on the site except write a few articles and syndicate to whoever would publish them. Sometime in 2008, I checked the rankings and found this.
It had climbed to #1 out of 92,100,000 results. I could not believe it. Traffic was up over 1000%, and the site was getting literally thousands of unique visitors a month just from this keyword. I checked the analytics and traffic was up and down and all over the place. After monitoring this for a few days, I experienced the "Google Dance" with rankings ranging from #1 to #4. Surprisingly, traffic amounts from positions 2-4 were not even HALF of the amount generated from position #1.
Jump ahead to June 2010. The website is ranking between #2 and #5 from day to day for car accessories. The surprising thing about this case study is that there hasn't been any additional marketing done to the site since around November 2008. Even with the low quality nature of directories, article directories, and even some reciprocal incoming links, the ranking has stayed top 5 for a really competitive keyword. I did take the time to get the website listed in DMOZ, the Google Directory, and a lot of other "good" websites. Some of the syndicated articles landed on sites like DIY, ehow.com, and other car enthusiasts websites generating some great inbound links. The site doesn't get credit for a lot of the low quality links that were acquired early on but I did do a few things right that had some great results.
I mentioned earlier that I am taking a more analytical approach to link building, and after reading a lot of articles, seeing this video about article marketing, and getting a better understanding of how much better Google is at identifying low quality links and websites, I have really changed the way I think about link building. Much like in the world of content, quality is better than quantity when it comes to obtaining links. After analyzing my own link building path from 2006 until the present, I came up with a list of best practices to guide my link building moving forward:
It is well worth the time to write great content as opposed to lots of decent content. Some of the best articles I wrote are the ones that attracted the most links and landed on good websites, and one or two were even highlighted in a breaking news story that brought a LOT of referral traffic while it was on the site's homepage.
If you figure out something cool or unique, like getting Pandora to play through a mono bluetooth headset, write about it and keep the content on your site and create a buzz using social media. Links will surely come.
Write content for your own site first. As Rand points out, you will get the links pointing back at your site for having the original content.
Here is one of my favorites - syndicate your RSS feed, not your article content. This is a philosophical change to the approach I used to have in article marketing. Instead of publishing your duplicate content everywhere, keep the content on your site and ping services like technorati, twitter, facebook, and anywhere you can publish your site's feed. Get visitors on your site and then give them an opportunity to bookmark or share your content via social media.
Quality directories are still valid. I have still seen good success from getting listed in the top human-edited directories, especially local and regional ones. Avoid the free-for-all sites and focus on the ones that add value to users.
Guest Blogging is a new hot-topic which is also worth doing. As Rand mentioned in this weeks WBF video, finding relevant websites to post content to is a good way to get quality inbound links and brand awareness. In many cases, you can get content for your site as well if you establish a good partnership with a complementary website or blog.
Patience is a virtue. It is hard to not check rankings every day, but there are a lot of other things to do with your valuable time than checking rankings. I schedule a time once a week to check up on how things are progressing. This keeps me from wasting time each day, and gives me a reason to measure results and dive into analytics at the end of the week.
Reciprocal links are not all bad. It is natural for complementary websites to link to one another, so the emphasis is on relevance. I will exchange links with relevant and complementary websites, but not with just any site. You want to make sure you are linking to reputable websites too.
Don't Spam. Search engines (like Google) mostly update their algorithms to do one of two things: to increase the relevance of the search results and to battle spam in their index. If you keep things relevant and avoid spam tactics, your rankings should remain intact as long as their isn't a fundamental shift in how websites and pages are ranked. Up until the recent "May Day" update, all of our sites have actually improved over the past few years with Google updates (The May Day update gave us about a 14% drop in the number of indexed pages, much like with SEOmoz and others).
Four years later, I have a much different approach to marketing, a different approach to life, and a lot of sites doing well in the search results. Marketing gives me an outlet for my competitive edge which is why I tend to climb the keyword mountains that I do. I would like to hear how your link building tactics have changed over the years and see how far we have come. I plan to keep a student's approach SEO, which continues to prove itself as one of the most frustrating, rewarding, and elusive things in life. It is (after all) a love story!
