Monthly Archives: July 2012

You don’t have to buy an office program

By Michael Busch on 31. July 2012

One of the improvements I added to the blog finder is that the results are now delivered as xls sheets.

This means you can use the autofilter feature to filter for a certain PageRank, for CommentLuv or KeywordLuv and of course for do-follow blogs or nofollow blogs.

Very short after the launch I got an email:

“Nice service, but what have you thought by sending xls files?? I do not have Microsoft Exel and I don’t intend to buy it! Your service has become worthless!”

Let me assure you: I do not own Microsoft Excel, too. Nevertheless I can open and work with excel files as I use StarOffice. Now you could say there is no difference whether I buy one or the other, both are expensive enough. But that is not quite true, because I got StarOffice for free, it is part of the free Google Pack.

You can download it for free together with some other cool pieces of software:

http://pack.google.com

If you don’t want the google pack and just need an office package, try OpenOffice. It is Open Source and it is the base that StarOffice is built upon:

http://www.openoffice.org

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Ranking experiment for firefox page

By Michael Busch on 29. July 2012

How fast can you get ranked if you want use your last chance on Google recommendations?

I will conduct a little experiment to see how effective 3waylinks really is:

As you may know the Google recommendations programme will be suspended end of August… Not much time if you want to make a little money from that.

Today I started a domain with firefox referrals and want to get it ranked in google as fast as possible. As a kickstarter I digged the page and made one doFollow blog comment on a blog I found here on seo-traffic-guide.de. That, together with the link from this experiment page should get the site indexed.

After that I will use nothing more than 3waylinks to get an accurate picture of the power of 3waylinks.

Of course I could do more linkbuilding – but I do not want to use any other methods in order to see what 3waylinks can do for me.

Stay tuned, next update will be as soon as the site gets indexed.

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Matt Cutts on the “link:” operator

By Michael Busch on 29. July 2012

There is often much confusion about the link: operator in google – some people still tend to believe that only backlinks from pages with PR > 4 are shown, or that what you get to see is the complete picture. Both is wrong! See for yourself what Matt Cutts from Google tells us about the link: operator:

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How valuable is a single backlink?

By Michael Busch on 28. July 2012

Well, I think that depends very much on the site this backlink is on. Would you pay 15$ for a single backlink to your site? I would say that is rather much. Would you take a 15$ discount if all you had to do is put a link to the shop on your page?
That is exactly where this story starts. Today I purchased a SSD Harddrive for my little home server at MemorySuppliers.com and was quite surprised when the offer for a 15$ cash-back in return for a single link came along with the shipping notice. Not only had they shipped my order just a few hours later, had the best bargain SSD drive and seem to have almost everything you could think of when it comes to computer memory – on top of that they value a backlink at 15$ ! And even without demanding a special keyword in the anchor text. Maybe they don’t know how important the link anchor is for ranking in google?

Dear staff at Memorysuppliers.com:

The keywords in the anchor are the most important thing because they determine for which keywords you rank well! And because of that I will reward you with an extra link: the best and cheapest memory can be found at memorysuppliers.com…

And for the rest of my readers: This is an excellent idea for getting backlinks to your business: Offer a rebate in exchange for a backlink from your customer’s web sites… And don’t forget to ask them to link with your favourite keywords as anchor text 😉

And by the way: They asked me to link to memorysuppliers.com but this link is redirected to www.memorysuppliers.com …Is this good or bad for SEO?

Post a comment right here below this article with your opinion on this topic!
Like this post? Publish It On Your Own Blog

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NeuroLinker: an automated link building system

By Michael Busch on 24. July 2012

NeuroLinker is a system for building automated backlinks. If you have followed my blog for some time, you know that I am a big fan of Jonathan Leger’s link programs, (see my article Getting backlinks with the “Leger Backlink Family” for an overview on 3waylinks, 1waylinks and mywaylinks)
Now that does not mean that I am blind to everything else, in fact there are other excellent programs out there, too, and one of them is NeuroLinker:
Neurolinker has not only has become a serious rival to 3waylinks.net, it incorporates most of the functionality of many other SEO services, which makes it a one stop SEO solution.

When neurolinker started, it was basically the same as 3waylinks, but they constantly added very useful features, and by now neurolinker is something like 3waylinks combined with 1waylinks plus a social bookmarking service + article marketing.

Let’s have a closer look on neurolinker:

Links from relevant sites
Neurolinker has an option to choose whether you want only backlinks from related sites. That will lead to much fewer backlinks, but you do not have to worry that you might get visitors from sites that don’t have anything to do with yours. There once was a category listing in 3waylinks, too, but is has no relevance.
If it is sheer quantity of backlinks that you are after, you can choose to get links from unrelated sites, too.
In 3waylinks there is no way to choose.

Deep links
In 3waylinks all links are links to your homepage. In neurolinker, you can create backlinks to any page on your website.
That is great for supporting inner pages of your site.

Number of Backlinks
Neurolinker states you get unlimited backlinks – of course that is only half the truth: The number of links is only limited by the number of members in the system, but it is definitely higher than with 3waylinks (250 backlinks per domain).

Amount of domains
3waylinks allows you to put up to 50 domains in the system – under certain circumstances, namely if you have domains with a PR of 4 or higher, you can put more than 50 domains in the system. Neurolinker has a quota of 100 domains from start…

Other Services
Neurolinker has a much broader portfolio of link types, they introduced an reciprocal social bookmarking service(digg and stumble). In Exchange to diggs and stumbles for your sites, you bookmark, digg and stumble other peoples sites…
Neurolinker also sports an article service. You can submit articles that will be published on other member websites – basically what 1waylinks does, too.

Now for all the extra functionality I would have expected a hefty price tag, but in fact neurolinker is even cheaper than 3waylinks.
Now if you asked me: Mike, do you abandon 3waylinks and use neurolinker instead?
My answer is easy: Of course not! 3waylinks is much too valuable to abandon it and contrary to neurolinker they accept my non english web sites, too. But neurolinker is far too powerful to ignore, so I use both, sometimes even for the same site, and what can I say: it is double the power than only one linking service 😉

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Is Pagerank really important?

By Michael Busch on 23. July 2012

To make it short: Yes and No!

Yes, because it determines a few aspects of the quality of your links.
No, because it doesn’t tell anything about your ranking for the keywords that will give you the most traffic…

For example, one of my very new sites, www.naturfotokalender.de, has a Pagerank of 0, not surprisingly…

But the ranking at the time of writing this for one of the main keyphrases (“Fotokalender Gimp”) is number one on the german google SERP…

But what is Pagerank, actually? If you have the google toolbar, then you will notice the Pagerank bar and will see that it shows a green bar. More green, higher pagerank, more important site. If it only was this easy…

Ian Rogers has written a comprehensive post on what pagerank really is and how it is calculated and so on:

Ian Rogers article on PageRank

Do I really need to know this?

In my opinion, not really. What you need to know is: If I get links from sites with high pagerank (or pagerank at all, e.g. a minimum of 1) then that is good. Is it good because it help you rank higher? Not exactly – it helps you rank faster, if, and only if, the links have the right anchor text. It helps you rank faster because sites with higher pagerank are spidered more often. That means your link will be found soon by google and can be taken into account. If you have a link on a Pagerank 0 site (grey Pagerank bar) then it takes maybe a month or longer until the site is spidered again (if at all) and it will take ages before this paricular link can contribute to your ranking.

So if you got a blog list from the blog search on seo-traffic-guide.de, look for the dofollow blogs with higher pagerank first…

I know that Pagerank is a controversial topic and I am fully aware that this was only a simplified way of looking at pagerank, so feel free to comment and tell me what you think about PR!

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Is there a google search operator to find dofollow blogs?

By Michael Busch on 21. July 2012

I sometimes get asked whether there is an easy way to find dofollow blogs with a simple google operator.
And while it would be really nice if we could find follow blogs just by typing in something like
dofollow:on mykeyword
it just does not work. And all rumors that this might come is nothing but wishful thinking – I don’t think that google will ever have an interest to show that data. And to be honest – for the vast majority of google users it also has no value at all.

Of course there are other search tricks that can help you find good candidates, for example if you search for “You comment, we follow” – but ultimately all this just finds user statements and is not 100% reliable as even if the blog owner had intended to make his or her blog dofollow there might be technical problems preventing it (outdated plugins, coding errors, you name it).

This means we will have to cope with the methods we have currently, like the blog search here on the start page of seo-traffic-guide.de.

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Some things should better be done by a professional

By Michael Busch on 19. July 2012

We web people always need content – and of course we need good content.

Recently I started to polish up some of my sites and wanted to add video. So I had an animation video made for me with computer generated voices.
That was not bad but it just sounded unnatural, so I decided to add real human voices. Now having a speaker do the voice over is really expensive – or so I thought. Let’s have a look at the hypothetic situation that I was doing the voice over myself:

I could have used my headset to record audio..yes that is true but the headset mikes are just… awful sound quality.
Next option: I could have plugged in my professional quality Microphone that I have lying around somewhere and record with that.
Better quality, but still noisy because my A/D converter is not professional quality.
All that is only a look at the technical side of the problem.

But there is a much bigger problem: I am not a speaker and when I record my voice it just does not come across as clear and understandable as it should when I want my video to be seen by a large audience.

So I decided: If you want it done properly, let it be done by a professional. I am sure glad that I found a professional german speaker for the videos for my new site bauchmuskeln.org . It did not cost me an arm and a leg as I had feared, in fact it was very affordable – had I tried to do it myself and had I paid myself the same hourly rate I charge my customers, it would have been far more expensive.

The name of the speaker I found is Christopher Badziong and he runs the site stimmlich.de. If you ever need someone for german voiceover I can really recommend his work.

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Ranking study: First hit from google

By Michael Busch on 17. July 2012

I have to admit – the first hit from google is for a keyword that is a little bit weird: “kostenloserfirefox mozilla”

But nevertheless – it is a hit and I checked the ranking – and now hold your breath: Google page one, ranking number 4! That is a very good ranking (Although for a seldom searched keyword)

Let’s hope that things go on like this and at the same speed!

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Get backlinks from social bookmarking sites

By Michael Busch on 15. July 2012

Jonathan Leger, in my eyes a real expert when it comes to getting links, wrote about getting backlinks from social bookmarking sites on his Internet Marketing Blog . He points out exactly what to do and why it works – and all in plain English and easy to understand. I recommend reading his post for everyone who does not want to rely only on blog comment links(that is what www.seo-traffic-guide.de is about), article submission or networks like 3Waylinks.

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