First off, I’d just like to let you all know this isn’t the usual guru himself who posts for this blog. I am merely a beginner in SEO and still learning the ropes, but finding success in my progress.

With that said, today I received an email newsletter from WebProWorld, that I subscribe to. A webmaster was asking if ‘links pages are worth it?’ I wrote in the forum to confirm that yes I firmly believe in the value of a good quality links page. A previous reply to his question mentioned that Page Rank shouldn’t really be acknowledged as it is anymore. I fully agree with his statement. I replied with, “Page Rank shouldn’t matter anymore, I mean Google is disregarding their standards for it anyway, so why should it matter to the webmasters?” I don’t understand why so many webmasters are all still caught up in the level of Page Rank a site has. It’s only updated to the public like every 3-4 months anyway, so who cares? I guess Google claims they are constantly updating every website’s PR but how would we know that if they won’t show it to the public? I guess I could rant all about PR as I’m fed up with so many people acknowledging it and using it against me with link exchanges, which is totally ridiculous - in my opinion.

I’ve learned that the easiest and most efficient way to create link exchanges is by creating links pages. I mean quality, content-full related links pages. For example: if you’d like to swap links with all kinds of Business sites, create a page on your site that talks about business and how it relates to your site. Write at least 3 paragraphs worth of content and try to intermix the links throughout the page. As long as the link you want to put on the business page is about business, then it should be a valuable resource for the user. And therefore, a valuable link exchange for both websites (as long as you find a relevant page to add your link to, that is).

Here is part of what I wrote in my reply to the forum question: “It will boost your website, as it appears to SERPs as ‘hey this website must be important if this other website is linking to it.’ It will help your rankings and SEO if you use the proper anchor text along with the URL you’d like to boost. Use your specific keywords that you’d like them to point to your URL. Obviously a one-way link would be the best you could ask for, but reciprocal links are easier to get from other sites, especially when they have relative content! Make sure there are no cheating tactics going on before you agree to link swap, like check robots.txt file, check for nofollows, noindexes, etc.” By no means am I saying to link with just any website out there. Make sure to research it first, check for those cheating techniques we all know about and make sure their page is indexed and cached before even asking for a link exchange. I’ve found the best way to use link trades effectively is to manage them properly. The most successful system for managing link exchanges BY FAR is LavaLinx.com!

Managing links by hand would get really hairy and virtually impossible. Save yourself the effort and headache of managing them on your own and just sign up with LavaLinx. I promise it will be very beneficial for you and your website. At least check it out. It doesn’t hurt to just look into something, now does it? It is a growing company that will boom real soon and I’d suggest getting in while it’s still the beginning. Just a hint!

With all that said, I am very excited to be in the field of SEO and to be learning from the pros themselves. I look forward to reading authority blogs and friends’ blogs I have found to be helpful. By no means do I call myself a ‘pro’ or ‘guru’ at this point. I’ve only had a mere six months worth of experience. But it’s an exciting world and it’s in high demand. Good luck to all with your websites and I wish you the best of success in all your endeavors.

About the author
Marci Anderson earned her Associates Degree from Utah Valley University and is pursuing her BFA in Photography. She loves social networking and one day would love to be an SEO guru herself and make tons of money from home!

My brother and I have been doing SEO work for a number of years now. I’ve made a career out of it, but he’s been able to do pretty well for himself. I talked to him recently about his efforts and he said that he is finding that his work in social bookmarking have pushed him up in the search engine rankings. My first reaction was doubtful on search engine rankings. Yes, social bookmarking can help bring social traffic - we get plenty from StumbleUpon -, but movement in search engines? How could that work they’re all nofollow links… And then it hit me. If the default of the social site is to apply a nofollow, how would the search engines tap into what is happening on websites that are cranking on the social side? Well, they would have to give weight to the nofollows from these social sites.

Remember the nofollow was introduced as a way that a webmaster could decide which sites he wanted to send weight to. He could talk about his competition and link to his competition knowing he could throw a weight killing nofollow on the link. Nofollows also seemed like a cure for blog spam so WordPress applied nofollows by default in their comments. To prevent SEO spamming social sites started applying nofollows to links.

Well, here’s the thing. If links in social sites have a nofollow by default, they’ve basically taken away a user’s ability to apply link weight to a site they want to recommend. So search engines wanting to tap into what’s happening on the social side only have one option… take into account nofollows on sites that apply them by default.

I’m going to be testing this theory. Please let me know if you’ve seen results that support this.

Yesterday I posted a blog on another site about lead paint in toys. The post was published in the morning and by that afternoon the post page was already indexed in Google. If you want to get your pages indexed really fast post a blog about what Google thinks is a “hot topic” and it’ll get indexed in a flash.

It also appears to me that Google’s spiders have really cranked it up a notch lately. I have sites that are getting 1000s of page indexed over night.