Atlanta Web Design Company – DoubleDome

Many websites will link to your website if you pay them for the link. Is this a good method to increase the link popularity of your website, or can you get in trouble if you use paid links?

Google is very clear about paid links. They don’t like them. Google even has an official form that enables webmasters to report paid links to Google:

“Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it.

Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

Christopher Bradley

Google has released an official statement about poor inbound links

Last month, Google published an official statement about low quality links in their webmaster blog. Here are the main statements:

• Linking is a significant factor in Google’s ranking algorithm but it is just one of many factors. Other factors are the content of your web pages, the site structure and the appearance of a keyword in the different web page elements.
• If you have a high quality website and get links from spammy websites, try to contact the website owners and ask them to remove their links. Google will not help you with that.
• It the webmasters of the spammy website are not cooperative, don’t worry and focus on the links that are under your control.
• Google recommends to optimize the many factors than influence indexing and ranking. The top 10 optimizer in our website optimization tool has been designed for exactly that task.
• It analyzes dozens of factors that influence the position of your website in the search results and it shows you what exactly you have to change so that Google will list your website on the first result page.
• Google says that low-quality links rarely stand the test of time and that they may not be considered by Google’s ranking algorithm.
• If you want to make sure Google knows about the spammy links and is valuing them appropriately, you can report them to Google with their spam report or paid links report forms.

Christopher Bradley

1. Personalization – Nothing says, “I don’t care about you” like a generic email. It’s like getting those letters in the mail addressed to “Valued Resident.” Personalization can come in the form of customized salutations, messages sent with a specific initiative based on a recent user activity (taking advantage of list segmentation), or even just the tone of the message itself.

2. Branding – Every message should incorporate your brand in some way. It can range from the complex, like videos and Flash, to the utterly simple, like a custom logo, customized signature or slogan. The point is, you want each email to be immediately associated with the sender.

3. Call To Action – Every message, no matter its content, must guide a user towards a specific action. If you’re sending a product announcement email, provide a link to a pre-populated shopping cart and a FAQ page. If you’re soliciting feedback, provide a link to a form, or other places to connect with the brand like your Twitter account or Facebook page. In all cases, make your call to action prominent. Tell the reader what you want them to do early and often. Once users become accustomed to your email as a portal for interaction and education, they will be much more likely to read it and respond.

Christopher Bradley