The following is a sponsored post.
For today’s post we’re going to be talking to Andrew Wise of SEOLinkWheelers.com, for my readers who don’t know you can you tell me a little about yourself, and your background in internet marketing.
My career in Internet Marketing is still very young, having recently graduated from school in 2007. My first start was for the pre-eminent music startup Grooveshark.com in a business development role. From there, I taught myself programming and began building my own web empire. Our goal is to ensure our customers’ success and to do anything in our power to make you happy, no matter the cost.
As every SEO knows links, are a critical element for ranking, what’s your approach to building links, and what are some the types links you feel should be part of every websites backlink profile.
For every new client, we recommend they invest in some of the best directories on the web, which we use on all of our sites. Yahoo Directory ($299/year), BOTW.org ($159/year with coupons available), and Business.com ($199/year). If you look at the sites with 100s of 1st page rankings, they all have these links, and you should too.
Your company offers link advertising in the form of link wheels. For the readers who might not know what is a “link wheel”, and how is it going to help their site?
Link wheels are the evolution of the backlink. When Google first created their algorithm, the way to get top rankings was to get links. The more links, the better, no matter where the links originate.
Everyone knows this doesn’t work anymore. Spam farms, inlinking from your own site, and other forms of garbage links do nothing for your site and are a waste of time. Today, the goal of most site owners is to get High PageRank, quality links.
So how do you get these links? Article directories , web 2.0 sites, and high PageRank blogs. A link wheel is a collection of sites that interlink (randomly) passing on PageRank to each individual site, and all sites pointing to the “money site”. Take this example below:
3 total sites
Site #1
A 200 word article is written on a blog, the blog has 2 links, 1 link goes to site #3, 1 link goes to the client site (ie “money site”)
Site #2
A 200 word article is written on a press release site, 2 links, 1 link goes to site #1, 1 link to the money site
Site #3
A 200 word article on a web 2.0 site, 1 link goes to site #2, 1 link to the money site
etc. etc.
The end result is you have 3 high PageRank sites, each getting random links from sites on different C-Class servers, with different IPs, and these 3 random sites are linking to the client site, creating the ultimate backlinks.
Our link wheels are constructed in much larger quantities: 37 sites, 74 sites, and 119 sites, package details available here
Let’s talk about the 800lb gorilla that’s now sitting in the room, paid links. Google has taken a pretty hard stance against link sellers in the past, whether or not we agree with their stance it’s something as SEO’s we have to be mindful of. Where do you feel your product falls on this issue?
Paid links are one of the most effective way to increase your sites’ ranking, there’s no doubt about that. If you look at some text link brokers, these sites are doing millions every month, but there’s a couple problems I have with this.
We run our own content sites in addition to providing SEO services, and all of our SEO services we use on our own sites, which is one of the reasons we are constantly evolving our services, so with that out of the way, here’s my take on paid link sites:
1) Google does not like directly paid links. Paid links are pretty easy to detect (ie any list of random links in a sites’ sidebar) or any sites that operate in the public marketplace are guilty, and may be punished at any time.
2) The paid links model is a rental model. Every month you are renting these links. If you stop paying, you lose all your rankings, so it’s just like PPC, so if you are looking to buy paid links, you are better off just using AdWords
– Our link building is permanent, and personally, I like knowing that every link we build for ourselves and our clients is an investment. Over time, you have to spend less and less money, which is how every business (I think) should operate.
Let’s change gears a bit, Google has always been a link based algorithm, but in recent months they have have admitted they are looking at other signals, like social media. Do you ever see links becoming less important than other factors?
Definitely.
Any SEO company who thinks what is working today is going to be working 3, 6 or 12 months from now is crazy. Google is going to evolve their algorithm, and its our job to follow their changes and make changes to our services to ensure they still work.
The main trend I believe we are seeing is a shift to quality content. The days of spammy 1990s websites ranking on the 1st pages of Google is going to fade away. As a site owner, I suggest everyone to get engaged in Facbook, Twitter, and as opposed to Google completely ignoring links, I think they are going to use social media sites to build a “trust factor” for domains, and only if you have certain “trust factors” are you going to be showing up at the top of the search engines.
It’s in Google’s best interests to display quality sites, and these “trust factors” are the best way to do that and also eliminate the spam.
If you ran a search engine what things would you be looking at in social media as signals of trust and quality? Are there places other than social media you think search engines should/might be looking now?
If I was building a new search engine, there are a couple of things I would use to determine how trustworthy a site is, how good of a source of information the site is going to be, etc.
1) RSS/subscriber count — the fact is, the more followers a site has, the more likely they are going to be to be a good source of information
2) Does the site have Facebook accounts? Twitter? GetSatisfaction? Yelp? etc.
3) How often is the site updated? This is a known piece of the Caffeine algorithm but its yet another indication of quality
4) If it’s an eCommerce site, what are the ratings of the merchant? Is it doing well on shopping.com, Google merchant center, etc.
Obviously we haven’t seen exactly what Google is doing on this front, but this is going to be the evolution of their algorithm in the future.
Since you have taken the time to answer these questions, give us your best pitch as to why someone should look at your companies services …
As I mentioned above, we use our services for our own sites. Everyday we are working on ways to improve our services and are constantly investing more money into our product. This past year, we expanded from a network of 100 blogs to more than 2,000 PR3+ blogs that we own and continue to expand in 2011.
From a customer service perspective, we are a small team, it’s just 4 of us, which means we’re selective. We want to work with people we like and who like us. The majority of our customers are referrals and we strive ourselves on making people happy and delivering them a great first class product at a business class price.
We’d love the opportunity to work with you, and we are confident we can help you increase your rankings. We’re US-based, and you can call us at 352-509-5736. If we’re on the line, just leave us a message or shoot an email to help@seolinkwheelers.com, we’ll get back to you as quickly as we can.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to me today Andrew. For anyone who is interested in SEO Link Wheelers be sure to check out their link wheel packages and use the coupon code
“graywolf” for 10% off your first order –
