AdMoolah News and Views

Here is a list of the blogs that I consider essential reading for any web publisher. I tried to be selective and keep it to a reasonable size.

AdSense/PPC

JenSense – Making Sense of Contextual Advertising – Jennifer always has the latest scoop on AdSense and other ad programs.
Inside AdSense – Google official AdSense blog.
inside AdWords – Google official AdWords blog.
Yahoo! Publisher Network – Yahoo’s official YPN blog.
Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense – Eric Giguere always offers good advice on AdSense and other publisher related issues.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO Book.com – Aaron Wall, author of SEOBook (aff. link) offers great SEO tidbits.
Graywolf’s SEO Blog – Graywolf always has an interesting tae on the SEO world.
SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog – Solid SEO advice.
SEO BlackHat: Black Hat SEO BlogShedding light on the darker side of SEO.

Search

John Battelle’s Searchblog – Author of “The Search” has excellent insights into the world of search.
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO – This Google employee always has good advice for publishers who are looking to keep clear of being labeled a spammer by Google.
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/ – Danny Sullivan’s SEW is an authoritative site,
Search Engines News – Great source for search engine marketing news

General Publishing

Shoemoney – Skills to pay the bills – Jeremy is a very successful publisher and has some great insights and speaks his mind.
Copyblogger – Great tips on who to write to attract traffic and sell.
AdMoolah News and Views – Of course I have to add my own blog!

Blogging

ProBlogger Blog Tips – The resource for anyone who has a blog.
Sifry’s Alerts – David Sifry runs Technorati and has a good grasp one what’s going on in the blogging world.

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.