Fri Jan 04 03:02:46 PST 2019

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Some blogs are out to lunch on their price. Some blogs are exceptionally link-
heavy and provide almost no value on a per-link basis, yet still want to charge
hundreds of dollars per month. Some other blog-type sites don?t know their own
value and will give you a link for a small one-time donation or review fee. Many
bloggers are just having fun and are not out to make a ton of money. An
additional bonus with blog advertising is that blogs are viral in nature, meaning that
if you have a viral-type product, then you may get many ongoing secondary links
for free.
Just to give you an idea of how cool Blogads are (especially for cause-driven or fun-
type sites
, I got many additional bonuses for my first ad set I ran. Over half of the
sites I ran my first ad on extended my ad longer than I ran it for, completely free.
In addition, one site provided me a permanent static text link and another site
placed my ad on multiple sites free.
If you have a message worth spreading, bloggers may help spread it. A couple of
the more popular blog ad networks are Blogads and AdBrite. Some of the links
provided by these blog networks may go through redirecting ad servers (and thus
not count toward your link popularity
, but the viral nature of blogs make them an
ideal marketing channel for many messages.
Rent Static Links
When renting links to improve search engine placement, ensure they are static
descriptive links versus links with a tracking code or links that get redirected
through some sort of ad server. Search engines usually do not evaluate most links
that are redirected or sent through an ad server.
Also, think of creative ways you can induce free inbound links before heavily
renting links. The best ideas tend to find ways to spread themselves. Money spent
improving the idea behind your site is better spent than money spent on renting
links since improving your idea or site builds recurring value without as much
recurring cost.
Links with Tracking Codes
When buying regular ads from websites, if you use tracking URLs, you may not
want to point them at your home page or other pages that already rank well in the
search results. Some webmasters have bought links from authoritative pages using
tracking URLs only to find that some search engines would spider that link and use
THAT page as the canonical URL.
Search engines only want to include each document in their search database once.
If a document is available at multiple different locations, like site.com,
site.com/index.htm, and www.site.com, the search engine will choose the page that
has the highest authority score, which is usually based on link authority.
That may not be a problem in some cases, but one of my friends had over 100,000
links pointing to his home page, and his rankings disappeared because the high-