New Orleans Internet Marketing

In the past I’ve done a few posts about PageRank that may help newcomers understand the difference between “actual” PageRank and “Toolbar” PageRank, along with some of the anomalies you will see if you look at the Google Toolbar for a long time (no, not visions of Mary either, just the little green bar).

One of the things I discussed in my post “Anomalies with Google’s ‘Toolbar PageRank,’” was the fact the sometimes search results will look strange when there is a site with low “toolbar PageRank” ranking high for competitive keywords. This is sometimes due to the possibility that Google has penalized the website’s “toolbar” PR for selling links.

This appears to be what happened to Blog Catalog today. Blog Catalog used to have a PR 6 or 7 homepage, and many interior category pages that were PR5, but if you check today, you will see that they’ve been bumped down to a PR4. Is Blog Catalog really selling links? You be the judge – have a look at the top right of the “Health” section page (click here).

Will this affect BlogCatalog’s search engine rankings? Probably not.

Although it has been argued both ways, I am of the opinion that it WILL affect the “link juice” that gets passed down to all of the blogs listed in their directory.

There’s a lot of ways to get links for most SEO campaigns, but one thing I almost always do is hire some outsourced personnel who contact related websites asking them to link to the site we’re promoting from their “Resource” pages. This can be very time consuming work, that’s why most of the people I’ve met who do this are from India. The value you get for your dollar is very good in India. We pay these link builders anywhere from $5 – $50 for a link, and we get a one-time fee, permanent link from another website. Outsourcing companies, like OutsourcedLinkBuilding.com are getting more and more popular due to the cheap price of labor overseas. Outsourced Link Building dot com in particular, has secured tons of valuable links for me in the past. Granted, there are times when I wind up paying for a few I wish I hadn’t, but the overall service is incredible for the price you pay.

The value you get from one-time fee, permanent links is so great, because when you specify a decent part of your budget for that, the links really build up over time. So does your PageRank, and so do your rankings. I’ve found so many ways to get permanent links these days, that it’s rare that I rent links. To me, renting links (paying a monthly fee) is little different from pay-per-click advertising in that you’re renting your space at the top. Don’t rent! Own!