Getting "Natural" One Way Links

What not to do.

[ken_b]

Leave out .........................conversion.

[ken_b]

What? You think maybe there's some info missing from my first post in this thread?

Well, that's what a lot of websites may as well look like to other webmasters who are thinking about linking to them.

If you can not be bothered to include the basic info needed for a successful "conversion", then why on earth would anyone link to your site?

Yesterday and today I went surfing for sites to link to.

I started with somewhere around 700 candidates.
I ended up linking to 110 sites.

What happened to the other 600 or so candidates?

Well about half were so far off base that they got scrapped at first glance, or returned a 404 .

Another 25% or so got a closer look, some were duplicates, some were so outdated the homepage told the whole story, others were not what they were at one time, but it took more than a casual glance to see that.

So now I was down to about 165 candidates. These were the sites that actually had some likelihood of offering my readers a reason to visit them.

But 55 didn't make the cut, why?

You want people to stop by and visit some day? You might want to at least say what state you are in.
Or city.
Maybe even give an address.

Or some way to contact you.

Oh yeah, you know that story from 2002 on your homepage? Well a good number of folks are going to see that and back out right there on the assumption that the site is dead.

And as you can see from my post count on this forum, I'm not exactly averse to forum participation.

But I'm thinking about rejecting any site that has the words "powered by" anywhere on the site, OK not really, but really, forum/blog software is not a substitute for meaningful planning and/or communication.

Oh yeah, and requiring a visitor to download something or another to use your navigation links, ...uhhhh... that may not be the best idea.

Just a few thoughts.

But hey, don't worry, those one way, unsolicited links from directly related sites aren't all they're cracked up to be anyhow.

[callivert]

forum/blog software is not a substitute for meaningful planning and/or communication

so I take it you don't link to blogs?
or, you hate sites that aren't blogs but are built on blogging software?
or both?

[martinibuster]

I agree to a point. The software for blogs and forums, just as the software or skills for creating a website, aren't worth much without careful planning.

If done right, blogs and forums are a meaningful way of adding usefulness to a site, and if planned correctly, of obtaining links. Just my opinion but when combined with a useful website about a topic, the usefulness of the three together can be greater than the individual parts.

[ken_b]

so I take it you don't link to blogs?
or,

Sure I link to blogs and sites with forums. But what looked like default style blog and forum software powered sites were over represented in the sites I didn't link to in this case. Enough so that it made me look more carefully at all sites such sites.

Of course the software isn't really the problem, it's just software. It's the implementation that is the issue. I agree that, well implemented, blogs and forums can add a lot to a site.

But that' wasn't the main focus of my posts, it's the lack of important information or initial signs of life on sites that was my main point.

[callivert]

it was a very useful post, and got me thinking about my own sites, both as a giver and receiver of links. I removed "powered by" from one of my sites!