Forum Moderators: martinibuster
We're launching a second site. I purchased a link management program and have begun to use it to spider potential link partners. I know that you can run into huge problems by using automation software too much, but from reading this board it seems the smart thing to do is to use software to keep yourself organized, to sort links, but then to personalize and emails and reciprocal pages.
First I want to ask just for general tips. I'm having my assistant work on this project full time. She's sorting through the links. We're starting with 10,000 links collected by the software. I'm hoping that results in 5,000 pages sites which we want to send requests to. From that I'm hoping that we can get maybe a 5% response link back rate?
My plan is after we've sorted out the sites which we are going to make requests to, to pull the full staff (6 of us) full time on sending personalized emails to the webmasters. It sounds like the thing to do is keep them short, include links in the email to more information, include a phone number, address and personalized contact information.
My biggest question is we'll put links up to those 5,000 or so sites and then send out the requests. Is that idiotic? Is that going to get us banned in Google and other SE's? How should we sort them? Do we break them into topics? When I purchased the software people on this board said this particular suite was pretty good at creating directory pages... but to go in an edit them. Is this still too risky? Should we spread them out by putting links at the bottoms of our reviews on our new site?
I totally understand the danger of using an automated tool. I'm willing to personally and have my staff put in the man hours to do personalized requests, and I don't think that this isn't going to take hundreds of hours, but I want to do it safely. What is the safe way to create reciprocal link pages? What do I need to do to make sure we don't get banned?
Also, our sites are very closely related. They each cover a product area which are very similar. Like one covers cars and one covers boats, both means of transportation. Does anyone have ideas on how we can use our existing site to get links to our new site?
For building your database, this is a great source for spidering techniques: [webmasterworld.com...]
You should plan to just flat out delete 50% of the sites collected, because the site does not actively engage in reciprocal linking. It shouldn't take more than a minute per site to make the decision. In that minute you should be able to also determine how to categorize the site. Of the 50% you keep, 50% of those will participate in themed-only reciprocal links, and you'd be stretching it to say that 1 of 20 will be in your theme. If you don't have other sites that these will be applicable to, delete them as well, this will leave you with about 2500 of the intitial 10,000 you started with, and at one minute per site, you'll have 167 hour invested to categorize or delete all 10,000 sites.
The reason you should do it this way is time-management. If all you do is have the employees delete or categorize sites, you can expect them to have a certain throughput. If they do the contacting and publishing the links at the same time, they'll claim each site takes 10 minutes to review and decide whether they delete the site or not, and you'll lose your donkey in the process.
Not all sites support themed-only reciprocal link campaigns. Some do. Anyone who tells you otherwise has blinders on (and most of us do have blinders on).
Also, by categorizing all sites initially, you can then go back through the sites and find the outlier categories, the ones with only a site or two per category, and consolidate them. Nevertheless, you also want to be considerate to the sites you are linking to and should limit outgoing links to 25 or 30 links per category. Over that, create a new category.
There are simply too many sites out there that will be glad to exchange links with you for you to waste you time on marginal sites. If there's a question as to their willingness from what you can see on their site, delete them, and move on.
Of the 2500 or so sites you have left you should expect between 25% and 50% will link back to you. The higher the ratio the more confident you can be that you are doing things right. So, you should end up with between 625 and 1250 links, but you'll have to publish 2500 links to get those. You'll create a mess in the process and will have to go back and clean the whole thing up later.
One thing you want to do is create your category pages ASAP, even if they have nothing on them, so that they can get some PR. I don't have any problem linking with taking links from category pages that have not PR because I'm cognizant of the fact that anyone who actively engages in this process WILL have PR on those pages in the near future, so don't insist that they have a minimum level of PR to start with. Later, as you go though and clean up the mess, you can check sites for PR and delete those links to those sites that did not develop.
Remember, incoming links NEVER hurt you (unless perhaps it's from a site that advertises that they are selling PR).
It will take you at least two months to go through all the sites and then come back through and clean up. It will take another 2 months for the full effect to come to the fore.
Google only updates these links on a delayed basis, but AlltheWeb updates everyday, and there can be great pleasure in watching your listed links increment by a dozen or more sites per day every day over an extended period of time, because you know as soon as google catches up, you'll get the effect you want.
