Download the LinkEx Script here: http://linkex.dk/
LinkEx will help you to do reciprocal link exchange and better your link building !
Let me first say link exchanges are far from my preferred source of links. Google has made it pretty clear they don’t care for these kind of changes and while that doesn’t mean all link exchanges are bad, mass reciprocal linking is generally frowned upon as a useful seo tactic. I’ve never engaged in link exchange networks and have no plans on doing so in the near future. Still there can be times when it makes sense to reciprocate a link and there can be times when a direct trade of links is perfectly natural. Think trackbacks for an example of a natural reciprocal link.
Quality Link Signals
The following list is far from exhaustive and in no particular order, but here are a few signs to help you recognize a quality link.
1. Links from related or topical sites
2. Links from trusted/authority sites
3. Links that can be crawled
4. Links that can send direct traffic
5. Links with relevant anchor text
6. Links to deep pages
7. Links that are contextual
8. Links that have aged
9. One way inbound links
If you look at the list above you’ll notice that most of the items on it can apply to reciprocal links. There’s no reason why you can’t trade links with an authority or related site. You can certainly set your own anchor text and have the links point to deep pages. Some of the reasons for the popularity of link exchanges a few years back likely had to do with how much control you could exert over the links back to you.
Of course there is that last item on the list. Reciprocal links are clearly not one way and three way links are only one step removed from being reciprocal and probably not that much harder to detect.
Questions about the value of link exchanges seem to come down to a few major points. How much weight is given to one way links as a ranking factor and how hard or easy is it for a search engine to detect the exchange? And once detected what will happen to a site with too many reciprocal links?
Is There Value in Link Exchanges?
Maybe, maybe not. Let’s first consider the question of how hard or easy it is to detect link exchanges. It should be relatively simple to detect direct reciprocal linking. Compare the incoming and outgoing links for any page and if there’s a match, bingo, we have a reciprocal link. Step up to three-way links and it becomes harder, but far from impossible to detect. Compare those same incoming and outgoing links and then also look at the pages on the other side of those links.
Add another level of exchange to four way and it becomes harder to detect. The further you get away from a direct one-to-one exchange the harder it should be for a search engine to detect, however once one site in the linking network is detected the rest of the sites in the network can often fall like a house of cards. And regardless of how difficult it might be to detect today I think it’s a safe bet that search engines will be looking for ways to better detect and discount any form of link manipulation. If your goal is to manipulate search ranking with your linking practice don’t blame the search engines later when your linking practices fail.
On the other hand there’s no such thing as a worthless link. Just about all links have some value, though how much can depend on some of your other link building tactics.
Also keep in mind that not all search engines are the same. Google has been clear they don’t like artificial link trades and they’ve been able to detect and discount many of those links. The situation isn’t necessarily the same for the other engines. What matters to Google may not matter to MSN.
Wiep recently gathered some seo and link building professionals and asked their opinion on a number of link value factors. Reciprocity was one of the specific factors discussed. The general consensus mentions reciprocity as having some influence over the value of a link, but here are a few quotes I pulled.
Joost de Valk: “Lots of reciprocals will get you a weird profile, some reciprocals won’t hurt though.??
Hamlet Batista: “Few reciprocal links are fine, but is far better to focus on the one-way ones.??
Maurizio Petrone: “Reciprocal links are not “The Evil”, but you should avoid them as your main link popularity strategy.??
There are more thoughts on the link value factors article, but consider the theme of the three quotes above. If too many of your links are seen as being part of an exchange then they probably aren’t going to do you any good. However, if you have a strong and balanced link profile with lots of non-reciprocal links you can probably see some benefit from adding a few exchanged links into the mix.
When Might You Consider Link Exchanges?
Ultimately that’s up to you. There are certainly pros and cons to exchanging links. The cons will far exceed the pros if you’re talking about mass reciprocal linking with anyone, but you can still find an exchange of links that provides a lot more pros than cons.
If CNN were to email me asking me to link to their home page in exchange for them linking back to mine. I’d be replying with a yes before I finished reading the email. I could care less how a search engine would see the link since the link itself would have the potential to drive a lot of direct traffic.
Search engines are also aware that some link exchanges occur naturally. I might add your blog to my blogroll and you might add mine to yours. In that case we’re going to end up with a lot of reciprocal links between our two blogs. I think search engines are smart enough to realize neither site should be penalized, though I also think they’re smart enough to realize they shouldn’t be giving huge gains to either site based on those links.
The cleaner your linking is in the eyes of a search engine the more you can get away with adding a links the engines might not think are so squeaky clean. Every site is going to end up with some junk links. That is natural. As long as it’s not overdone chances are you won’t lose anything by exchanging links, though your gains might not be much either.
If you can still get in enough quality signals on the links odds are the link exchange won’t hurt.
There’s one obvious time when you can exchange links to your heart’s content. When you don’t care about search engines. We sometimes get locked into the train of thought that all traffic must somehow originate through a search engine results page. Hardly. Search traffic is one form of traffic. A good source, yes, but only one source nonetheless. Links aren’t always about search engines.
Exchange enough links with enough sites and while your site may get put on the permanent search engine spam pile you might still end up with a lot of entry points into your site resulting in traffic. If you’ve chosen link partners well the traffic might even be pretty good.
Back to the question of whether or not you should use a service like LinkEx. Once again I’ll avoid the answer a little and leave it up to you. Will I use their service? Probably not. I think the risks will outweigh the reward for my particular circumstances. Should you use them? Depends on your circumstances. Instead of thinking about it in terms of black and white or good and bad, understand the potential benefits and understand the potential risks and decide if it makes sense for you and your sites. Most of the time the risks will probably not be worth taking, but sometimes they might.
LinkEx isn’t going to be a magic bullet to seo success. I’d guess for most sites it can do more harm than good, but that doesn’t mean it will do harm to all sites or site owners. Understand the risks, understand the rewards and decide if it makes sense for you. LinkEx doesn’t make sense for me, but you’re not me and I’m not you.
Make Money Online By Blog Commenting
Jun 4th, 2008 by Admin
I toyed with whether I should talk about this… it’s made me around $1,000 in the past with little to no work and I have not seen it discussed (this exact way) on any other blogs before. However, I have nothing to gain by keeping the idea a secret (I don’t use it anymore - bigger fish to fry) and you guys have plenty to gain by learning about it.
I promised that I’d talk a little bit about making money online for newbies, that is people with not a lot of money to invest. How are you going to start a affiliate website, pay for Adwords and content creation when you only have $50 in your bank account? This is a way that anyone can make money, and best of all it doesn’t cost you a dime.
A few days ago I recommended forum posting as one of the ways to make money for newbies, which didn’t need any investment - once you read this post, and if you carry it out successfully, you’ll never need to post in forums again. In forum posting, you get maybe $0.15/post maximum (using an established company like Forums First) and then you have other requirements - your posts have to be at least x words in length, your posts have to be spread out appropriately throughout the forum, you have to make x threads for x posts… bah. Thinking = work and when you’re getting paid so little, you don’t want to have to work a lot. 
Here’s how you can make money, and easy money by providing a blog commenting service. Yes, you can do this from the comfort of your home, yes, you don’t need any investment, and yes I’m going to tell you the exact steps to follow. 
First off, let me explain why this works. Now me personally - I don’t care about PR; it is only a number, and after I’ve made certain posts on here I am not going to make much money off it. For some webmasters though… they start developing mini-orgasms every time the term is mentioned, and it is them that will make you money.
People pay for links, and sometimes quite a bit too - a standard PR6 link can easily go for $100/month and if you go upwards of that well - you’re in business. What if I told you that you could get such links free, and what if I told you that you could make money off this?
I’m talking about commenting on dofollow blogs. As you know, dofollow blogs do pass PR, and the links are permanent. The problem with dofollow blogs is that it is hard to find them - not many people like displaying that ugly badge in the sidebar (I don’t) and even if you find a dofollow blog whose homepage has PR, commenting on it is useless as the specific page you comment on needs to have PR for it to be passed on to your blog (in this case, the specific post).
Now, how do you get around to finding these blogs, and then how do you get around to finding these posts?
Luckily for us, one of the blogs I read regularly compiled a Do follow list of blogs, and you can find that at Courtney Tuttle’s D-List.
So you have five pages of dofollow blogs. Now the problem is, which blogs should we comment on and which blogs are worthless? You can be dofollow, but if you have a PR0 blog, you’re not passing any link juice on.
What you need to do is use iWebTool’s Visual PR checker, and run it through the D-List. What iWebTool does is show you the PR of links on the page, and whether they are dofollow / nofollow. Use this and run it through all five pages of the D-List, and then copy and paste the URLs that are PR2 or more into a notepad file. I think you are only allowed to run 100 - 200 queries per IP per day so if it shorts out (and stops working) use a proxy or wait a day.
Now you have a list of blogs that do pass link juice and do have a decent Pagerank. However, you need to find the internal pages that have PR, for us that is the blog posts that have PR.
There are two ways to do this:
The first is LivePR’s internal checking tool, which will take a URL that you enter into its box, deliver you a list of pages with their Pagerank and then allow you to sort.
The second is SEO Junkie’s PR Checker program (download here), which you can download. It does the same thing, and provides you a file with pages and their respective pagerank
Both of these tools have limitations - the first only allows you to check once every hour (and has a habit of shorting out every so often) and the second works in the same way that iWebTool does - x amount of searches per IP per day, and then you have to wait. However, if you are patient you can use the combination of these tools to compile a list of blog posts that have PR and pass link juice.
Another thing you can use to find such posts is Comment Kahuna (which unlike its sister Traffic Kahuna, is actually useful & free). This works on the keywords you enter into it - choose “money”, “blogging” etc and it will give you a list of posts that are dofollow. The numbers it returns are less than the other two but it works as long as you want to use it.
So you have a list of blog posts with PR, ranging from PR2 to PR6 (and sometimes more ). If you want to use this for your own gain, leave comments on all of them with a link pointing back to your website - you will see a nice increase in the next update (you can see what amount of links to get to where in this chart). Make sure you leave relevant comments and add value - they don’t have to be long, but it does have to be non-spammy.
How do you make money?
Simple. Provide a “link building” service where you build links for webmasters and make money. I’ve done this in the past and charged $1/PR2 link, $3/PR3 link, $7/PR4 link, $10/PR5 link and $15/Anything above that. As these links are permanent, people will be happy to pay.
Why earn a cent a word forum posting when you can earn a dollar a word building links?
You can provide a link building service at the various larger forums.
If you are a lazy bastard like yours truly, you can hire the same people that do forum posting, pay them $0.2/comment and you keep the rest. Everyone wins 
Is this unethical?
To me, it isn’t. Blogs are dofollow because they want comments, and if you add useful comments then there is nothing wrong with that. I have no problem if people spam the hell out of my dofollow pages, as long as they add to them - if you are not adding to the discussion, expect to be IP-blacklisted.
Getting Traffic from DIGG.com Comments
Jun 2nd, 2008 by Admin
We all need traffic, Don’t we ?
So here is a great find to get Traffic from Commenting on Digg.com
Read these tips carefully
- First, your links must post to quality content. The three articles I linked to above are well-written, well-researched articles. Two of the three articles that I linked to have even been featured on Slashdot (1, 2). Quality, of course, is a relative term. Given the typical Digg banter, the threshold for adding quality content can sometimes quite low. The links, however, cannot point to pages that are clearly blogspam or you are sure to face Digg’s wrath.
- Must be on topic. This is probably more important than the quality of the link. It may seem obvious, but if your comment/link doesn’t relate to the article, especially if it contains a link, then it will be buried.
- First posts comments are going to receive exponentially more traffic than later posts. They can set the tone for the rest of the discussion and can be almost as important as the actual article being linked to. If the Digg article already has a comment then it is usually better to reply to the first comment than submit a new comment. This is true even if your comment isn’t a direct response to the comment you are replying to. Otherwise, the first comment will eventually get dozens of replies, pushing the second comment way down the page where it will not be seen by most. For example, I replied to the first comment on a post about Google searches. The first post was buried with 16 negative votes which effectively gave me the first post. This comment brought 509 visitors. In my opinion, this is a flaw with the Digg comment system where you can only reply to root comments. It provides an incentive for disjointed discussions. I suspect that Digg will redo their comment system at some point in the near future.
- If you are looking for traffic from your posts, it does little good to comment on articles that are already on Digg’s front page. There are two reasons for this. First, you no longer have the first post advantage and your comment will be lost among the masses. The second reason is that the highest amount of traffic will come while the post is at the top of main page. Each minute that passes is lost traffic. It’s much better to find future front page stories from the upcoming stories section. This is not hard. Checking the “hot in technology” on the right side of the page will show you which posts are most likely to hit the front page in the next few hours. Of course, you can drill down to other topics besides technology as well. The cloud view and other tools can also be used to predict which stories are most likely to hit the front page.
- As with all forums and websites, if you focus solely on promoting your website it will eventually come back to haunt you. All your links and submitted stories should not be to your own sites.
- Digg, as a general rule, has a negative bias towards all things SEO and marketing. If you have a name like SEOmoz (sorry), there are some people that aren’t going to give you a fair shake.
- Digg does not use the NoFollow tag. However, if you receive a ‘thumbs down’ from four users your comment will be hidden by default. At some point in the future Digg may follow Wikipedia’s lead and move to NoFollow tags. I’d recommend it to prevent link spam but generally the community is quick to bury.
- Realize that although you may receive many new visitors they may be less likely to stay around than traffic you receive from other sources. As you can see from the statistics below, the bounce rate was between 74-92%. The average time on site was 20 seconds for the Mythbusters article and just over a minute for the fuel and gas articles. I’m sure that there are ways the site can improve its stickiness (any ideas?), but the point remains the same—Digg visitors are less likely to stick around than traffic from other sources.
By way of full disclosure, the site I linked to, OmniNerd, is not my site. I have no financial relationship with the site and don’t know how their GoogleAds performed, but I suspect that very few visitors from Digg clicked on ads. If AdSense earnings are your primary motivation, Digg is probably not your best option.
Although this is not my site, OmniNerd did let me peek into their Google Analytics for this story. Since the stats used above are from Google Analytics and not the server logs, the actual traffic may be higher than I reported. According to something I read on StumbleUpon, “A large portion of…Firefox users have added the NoScript add-on to their browser. This is one of the top-10 most popular extensions for Firefox. This extension blocks any javascript calls…caus[ing]…Google Analytics…to not work.” If that’s true, then the actual traffic from these comments could be higher than recorded. Currently about 50% of OmniNerd’s recorded visitors use Firefox. How many are not being counted? Does anyone have experience with Google Analytics not counting all their traffic?
Although Digg comments can be a valuable source of traffic, the reaction to spam can be painful. A couple months ago Chandler Kent learned that the hard way when he submitted a comment with a link to his blog under his name, as is common practice in most forums. It quickly received hundreds of “thumbs down” but didn’t stop there. Someone posted his phone number and he began to receive creepy phone calls and comments such as he “deserves to be hunted down and stalked.” Ironically, his recounting of the fallout was widely publicized as “The Most Hated Comment on Digg” and brought him a ton of traffic.
Comments on Digg can bring you some nice traffic if you are willing to risk your life.
