Link popularity, i.e. the number of sites which are linking to your site,
is an increasingly important factor as far as search engine placement is concerned. Other
things remaining the same, more the number of links to your site, higher will be its
ranking.
What is important is not only
the number of links to your site, but also the types of sites which are linking to you. A
link from a site which is related to yours is more valuable than a link from an unrelated
site.
In this article, I explore
different methods by which you can improve the link popularity of your site. I start with
a method that you shouldn’t bother using, then go on to the moderately effective
methods, and then end with the most effective methods you can use to boost the link
popularity of your site.
1) Submitting your site to Free For All (FFA) pages
A common misconception among
many Internet marketers is that while FFA pages may not directly bring in traffic to your
site, it will help to improve the link popularity of your site, and hence, will indirectly
bring in traffic through the search engines.
Nothing could be further from
the truth. Most FFA pages can contain only a certain number of links at a time. This means
that when you submit your site to a FFA page, your site will be placed at the top of the
page. However, as more and more people submit their sites to the FFA page, your site will
be pushed down, and finally, when it reaches the bottom of the page, it will be removed.
Now, since you can bet that
plenty of other people are also submitting their sites to the FFA pages, your site will
remain in these pages for only a short span of time. Hence, in order to ensure that the
search engines see your site if and when they come to spider the FFA page, you will need
to ensure that you submit your site to these FFA pages on a regular basis – at least once
a week.
Even if you used an automatic
submission program to do it, can you imagine a worse way to spend your time and/or money?
Furthermore, many search engines recognize these pages which only contains links to other
sites as FFA pages and may completely ignore them. And while I haven’t yet seen any
evidence that submitting to the FFA pages will actually penalize your site, there is every
possibility that this might happen in the future.
Hence, when it comes to FFA
pages, my advice is simple: don’t even think about them.
2) Starting an Awards Program
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