AdMoolah News and Views

A new website ReviewBack launched today. It provides a service where people can review each others blog. The sign up is free and there are no fees involved in getting or giving reviews.

This service is sort of like ReviewMe or PayPerPost, except that instead of paying cash for a review, you pay by providing your own review back to the site that reviewed you. So far, I don’t see any signs of how they are going to monetize this service, but I assume that it will be advertising based revenue.

This seems like a great way for smaller blogs to get some link love and attention from other bloggers. I have signed up, along with about 60 other blogs. Right now there hasn’t been any “review action”, so I’m not even sure how the whole process works. If you want to find out how this thing work, sign up and request a review from me! I have to warn you that I will be very very picky about who I accept a review exchange from.

(I hope you don’t mind me plugging my new site again, but I am sure this announcement will appeal to a lot of you.)

I have enabled a new feature on SEOyak.com. Whenever you submit a story, you can create a text ad that will be displayed permanently on the story page. SEOyak.com participants know the value of a text link, so it should be a great incentive for users to start to submit stories. Here are details of the ad program.

So sign up now, or if you are already signed up, go submit a story.

One of my favorite sessions at PubCon was Viral and WOMM Marketing Management. All the speakers were good, but I found Lawrence Coburn’s talk about web widgets particularly interesting. A widget is a small piece of code that can be placed onto a website that will provide some kind of functionality to the users of a site. Some example of popular widgets is the embedded YouTube player that you see on countless blogs, or StatCounter. For some more examples of widgets see Steve Rubel’s blog post.

One reason web widgets are good for publishers is because they are a great way to build links. The HTML for the widget almost always includes a link back to the site of the widget creator. This can be a very powerful source of links. Statcounter.com, for example, has over 50 million backlinks, according to Yahoo. This is because whenever someone uses a counter widget from StatCounter.com, they get a backlink. StatCounter.com is the number one result for “web tracker”, “hit counter” and “web stats” on Google.

One great piece of advice that Lawrence gave during his talk was rotating the text of the link back to your site. Having identical text in your links doesn’t look very natural to search engines, so rotating the text that is displayed can help with rankings. It also allows you to target different keyword phrases. Another good idea is to provide links to different pages of your site, not just the home page. Again this is something that looks more natural to the search engines.

Web Widget Resources

Lawrence has a blog about widgets called Sexy Widgets.

One interesting service is, MuseStorm, which provides tools for building widgets. However, as far as I can tell, a widget built with MuseStorm do not contain links back to your site. Update: It appears that publishers can have links back to their own sites using MuseStorm.

There are two sites that launched yesterday that seem to be getting some good results. Both are getting impressive statistics with different viral marketing approaches.

The first is ConquerYouNiche.com (affiliate link), which I mentioned yesterday. This forum allows user to display their own ads. When you post or read the forum you get credits which are exchanged for displaying ads. You also earn ad displays from people you refer. It seems like this idea has really taken off because they already have over 8000 registered users! This was a smart viral marketing plan by the forum owner. This type of incentive would be difficult to reproduce outside of the Internet Marketing world, however, because most people wouldn’t care about being able to display their own ads.

The second one is ReviewMe, which I also wrote about yesterday. They are using a more brute-force approach by paying bloggers to write about them. It seems to be working too, a Technorati search for ReviewMe shows about 140 blogs mentioning them in the last 24 hours. These are links that will be in the middle of highly targeted content. Their Search Engine Ranking should be going through the roof pretty soon.

These numbers are great for a 24 hour period. Viral marketing is great way to get a lot of people to your site quickly if you do it right.

Linkbaiting is a hot topic in the SEO world these days. As old-school link building techniques such as directories, link-exchanges and buying links become less effective, SEOs are trying to get (Gasp!) natural links. Linkbaiting is just a tactic to try to build content that will attract natural links. This fits in nicely with social media sites, such as Digg and del.icio.us that have been all the rage lately. Getting linked from these social media sites is likely to result in many bloggers writing entries about it. Done right, there is a viral spread of the link around the web, resulting in hundreds or even thousands of natural links.

It sounds fairly simple, but it’s not. If it was simple everyone would do it, right? Some of the critical aspects to getting linked to include getting the right idea, having good headlines, and getting it in front of the social media sites and bloggers in the best light possible.

The best piece of linkbait I came up with for AdMoolah was the AdSense Revenue Sharing page I started in January. According to Yahoo, that page has close to 100 links to it, including some high quality ones from places like SearchEngineJournal and ProBlogger. I don’t think linkbaiting wasn’t in my vocabulary at the time, but I knew it would attract a lot of attention. I didn’t promote it very well and didn’t position it well at social media sites. If I did, who knows how many more links I could have gotten.

SEOs are starting to provide link baiting services. They will help you come up with the idea for link bait, develop it, and make sure it gets the right exposure. These services are not cheap though, they start at $5,000 for the basics, and go up from there. Here is a list of linkbaiting services:

• Andy Hagans
• SEOMoz
• Stuntdubl
• Text Link Ads

At these prices, I’m not sure how much business they are getting. It would be interesting to get get the feedback of someone who had used these services. Maybe somebody with deep pockets (like ShoeMoney) could test out all 4 services?

If you have two sites in a similar niche, should you put links between them?

This is a difficult question. With the popularity of webmasters doing link exchanges to try to boost their ranking in search engines, Google has decided to devalue reciprocal links. So linking two of your own sites together may not help you get better ranking from Google. It is often better to stay with one-way linking from one of sites to another. To get the maximum boost in Google, it is usually better to have links from one of your higher ranking sites to a lower one.

On the other hand, having links between two related sites can help you get traffic directly. People see the link on one site, click it, and discover your other site.

So we have a little dilemma. We can link our sites together with reciprocal links and risk not getting ranked as well as we could in Google, or we can stick with one way links and lose some potential traffic from one site to another. What do we do?

The solution I have come up with is make one of the links a link that will not been seen by search engine spiders. If I have two sites that are related I will still link the higher ranked page to the lower ranked page using a regular link, but I will use a JavaScript link from the lower ranked page to the higher ranked page. If you want to be extra cautious, this link can also be redirected through a page that has a “nofollow” robot meta tag.

Of course, this same strategy will work if you have 3, 4 or even more sites that you want to interlink.

I’d love to hear you thoughts on this linking strategy.

Coincidentally, Eric Giguere also wrote a post about interlinking sites yesterday, but he has a different strategy.