FeelingWow! Magazine

I started researching what is now known as SEO about 13 years ago. I tried over and over to build the site that I dreamed would rank at the top of Google. At the time I began the key apparently was Meta Tags. I made meta tags just like my competition, and made by key word density for the words in those tags higher. I figured that would easily put me to the top. I waited for months on sites, and I never moved at all. One thing I did find interesting is there were some reputable sites that were stuffing words in like pornography, XXX etc to try to capture free traffic on highly searched words even though their sites were not relevant to those results. Basically after nearly duplicating sites I never improved my rankings.

So then I got into the impression that the size of the site had a lot to do with ranking. Some of the topics I have chosen to build websites on were impossible to build a large site on. Every number one site I saw on google though, if you did a site:http://www.domain.com search had thousands of indexed pages. Then I stumbled upon a program called Traffic Booster Pro. This was the answer to my question. This program basically builds a bunch of junk pages that take content from RSS feeds and make it unique by randomizing the words. It creates thousands of pages all optimized and linked together, and generates a sitemap. Google was crawling my site like crazy. And for one of the most searched words on the internet, I ranked in position 60 within a few weeks. I was so excited, I thought for sure I was right, I needed the bigger site, the larger the site the better I would rank. If I couldn’t build that many pages, this program would do it for me, but when my users click on one of those they are redirected to my main page. I got some traffic for a while, and then one day my site crashed for about an hour. The reason it crashed is because Google was crawling it so much the traffic overloaded the data center that I was housing my information. Not the server I was on, the entire data center. My sitemap tracked in Google Sitemaps had thousands of errors. I had my datacenter folks get back online. When I checked my rankings I found all those keywords I was ranked for were dropped to nothing. I went from 60 to not in the top 1000. I thought this would be rectified soon, I adjusted my crawl rate, let my data center know this site was taking a lot of traffic. I waited 2 months and my rankings never came back. The site I had has a unique domain name that is not even a word, and to this day that site doesn’t even rank number one for the domain name. Therefore that site has been penalized, there is no other answer.

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.

To answer the question no you should not EXCHANGE links. There are two ways to get links to your site that impact your rankings. First of all you share information like this. This article is going to get a bunch of links to my site, and help my rankings, and all I do is share my experience. I do this several times a day with several topics that have to do with my sites. So how do I get links that help my site.

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.