Hi Gang

We have just taken delivery from one our associates an incredible deal for Link Wheels.

The size of the Link Wheel we ordered was for 100 spokes (pretty massive) and it also came with a free shot for the links to the supplier’s autopligg network. Now to be honest, this was very much an addition that was useful for spidering purposes if nothing else.

Pligg, for those who aren’t aware is a nice little application that is effectively an OS equivalent of Digg, i.e. it works very much by way of peer recommendation and votes etc but to be honest has very much been abused over the past 12 months or so and as such the majority of the thousands of Pligg sites there are out there are all virtually now “nofollow” so for SEO purposes it is not that much use but they do add to your IP spread so there is a limited value. In this case we were more interested in the coverage for the client and the spidering so we went ahead.

The Link Wheel, when it arrived, actually comprised 117 spokes instead of the 100 guaranteed and what really made us feel good about this was that when we entered the urls into our Bulk C Class IP checker we found the following results:

Domains Entered 117
Total distinct domains: 117
Unique IPs: 113
Unique Subnets: 108
Domains with Duplicate subnets: 15
Domains with Duplicate IPs: 4

Which I think most folks will agree is pretty damn good for SEO purposes.

Now there are a number of ways of looking at this and I think the best way is as follows and this is the real reason I am writing out to all members about this. Firstly all these sites are based on WPMU which as you all know is the multi user platform for Wordpress so is good for Googlebot recognition for starters. When we checked there were some nice PR4 and PR3 domains in there so its going to do some good as well but the real bonus for all of you out there who reckon they can do this sort of thing cheaper is this. Firstly, what you get is a good working list of WPMU sites for future reference which in itself is a result. We managed to compile a list of about 240 WPMU sites recently through a supposedly well known piece of software that is good for checking footprints etc and the results were complete junk.

By junk I mean we managed to find about 25 working sites out of 240 and it took us over 3 hours to check so we wasted all that time.

Here the grunt work is done for you.

The other aspect of this and is the reason that we will continue to use this service for our SEO clients (that’s how much we rate this service) is that on an hourly charge-out basis it’s a complete no-brainer.

The service retails at $90 for a 100 spoke Link Wheel (better that on Warriors? I think not), takes 6 days to deliver and will probably over deliver again. We have managed to negotiate a discount rate for our members of $20 so the cost drops again from $90 to $70 which is even more of a steal and I am sure as our usage of this service grows that we will be able to get an even keener price which of course we will pass on to members as and when this happens.

The other way of looking at this is how can you get this done yourself for the price?

Outsource it?

OK yes but as I said, you have to find the working WPMU (which are also still dofollow) sites first and that as we have shown takes time and effort and that costs.

My recommendation, get in touch and we’ll set up the process for you?

Cheers

Steve

PS more deals on the way, just looking after our members best interests.

PPS No here’s a thought? Take the above and plug it into 382 + Social Bookmark Directories and you have a serious amount of promotion going on, know what I mean? Watch this space for the results and see how it goes

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With the latest results from the last Google PR update still streaming in it appears the this PR update has been good for quite a few SLS Members with at least one member reporting a PR jump from 0 (yes thats zero) to PR4 for nearly 20 sites that he was exclusively using SLS2010 to promote.

More members are reporting good rises in SERPS and regular appearances on Page 1 in Google for competitive terms.

There are limited places in the first phase of SLS still available, those interested get in touch.

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Hmnnnn, this one’s actually a biggie and speaking as someone who is the main principal behind a keyword rich site name i.e. Simple Leveraging then technically that should “nail my colours” to the mast.

In the interests of fairness let me highlight two opposing viewpoints on the issue and then give you my take.

First up there is Scott Boyd at Fused Nation ( http://www.fusednation.com/seo/q-are-keywords-in-your-domain-name-an-important-ranking-factor/ ) who is of the opinion that “there was a time when keyword domains were synonymous with spam (because as I said, spammers used to buy up keyword domains and throw up spam sites because they used to rank well because of the keyword in the domain). Personally, I ignore link requests and business requests from keyword domains for that reason – this may be the exception rather than the rule, but I believe there are probably a good percentage of website owners who feel the same.”

Whilst I agree with him on certain points in that it did cause a whole wave of “brain dead SEO” i.e. never mind about anything else just get a domain name linked to your keywords I still think having your keywords in a domain name still does have a certain amount of kudos.

These probably relate more to branding awareness and associate issues more than anything else. For example David Airey in his post about the “Real Value of Keyword Rich Domain Names” (http://www.davidairey.com/domain-name-keyword-importance/ ) uses two of his own sites as examples, logodesignlove.com and davidairey.com. He states that: “logodesignlove.com has significantly gained ground on davidairey.com because people use the text ‘logo design’ within their links, as opposed to ‘David Airey’.

An inbound link (one coming from another website) pointing to davidairey.com is most likely to be typed as David Airey. A similar link to logodesignlove.com is most likely to appear as Logo Design Love.

Considering the importance of anchor text on inbound links, this will have quite a bearing on web searches for ‘logo designer’.

With that in mind, the main point still reverts to your content, because if it’s not good quality, you won’t create any inbound links.”

I can understand and agree in parts with all that the above are talking about but as of the date of this post it has to be said that in empirical tests that if possible give me a keyword rich domain name (if available) any day of the week. I am currently looking at a domain name (a .com) registered as part of a potential joint venture in an ecommerce project over 3 months ago that as I write this piece has only a Title tag, a few lines of text and nothing else but is 100% keyword specific for its market (this is DIY and Home Refurbishment) and the domain name is sitting at No 1 in both Google and Yahoo in categories where there is over 450,000 competitors and a limited amount of traffic.

So to sum, if you can, get a keyword rich domain name but don’t lose any sleep if you can’t as a successful name and profile can just as easily be built up using great content (now that’s another issue) and smart SEO.

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There has been a great amount written about which types of links are the best, which work best and which ones to avoid.

I hope to refer to this in more depth at a later date but all I will say at this point in time is that (in my opinion) any links are good and indeed there are some Article Directory scripts that only report links in their basic url form as opposed to anchor driven variants.

The other thing to remember folks is that the anchor phrase used in inbound links only represents one of several factors in Google Algorithm and not the only factor. Bear in this mind and also consider the other (quite often) hidden aspect to all of this and this is the fact of IP spread.

This is quite often overlooked by a lot of folks and even when considered by most still don’t completely understand this. It is not always just a case of just getting links from sites with just a slight variation of C Class IP address.

People seem to forget that actually it is much better if you can fill your boots with links from as many A and B Class IP’s first if possible.

For more information about A and B Class IP’s and actually about Internet Protocol matters in general then go here:

http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/i/ip.htm

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classful_network

More later

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It appears that as of the time of the post that Google have either completed or in the final stages of completing another Page Rank Update.

As with all events like this there are winners and losers but all I have to say to anyone is that at the end of the day, Page Rank matters damn all in the universal scheme of things, its SERPS that matter and many’s the time I have seen in the SERPS, medium to high PR sites (PR4+) get their butts whipped (as an american colleague of mine so eloquently puts it) by relatively low PR sites (i.e 1 or above).

Here are a few links to how the update is being received in parts Google Page Rank Update Discussion and more detail about this can be found at this Google Info Blog

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