Lately on the search engine optimization market came out a new project LinkGator.NET claiming it is going to 'gator' other SEO competition by its fresh viral marketing scheme.
I want to make my own inquiry to find out if its really workable.
On the early dawn of cyberspace, when link exchange concept was in germ there was spread an interesting multi level marketing way of permanent links, pointing to one's website. The idea was rather childlike. A SEO marketer had to re-create some HTML page with 5 links on it to his own website and place a visible link to this page on his/her website's main page so that search engines could easily find the link and follow it to the special 'five links' page. At the bottom of this links page there was a short instruction for would-be link partners.
The instruction was kind of: This awesome idea could give one thousands of static links pointing to your websites as well as massive traffic of targeted visitors if you follow our simple instructions.
You should simulate this HTML page to some place on your own website, delete the link #1 in the list and place your own link to place #5. One had to keep the instruction bellow intact too.
So a link to your website could be distributed on hundreds and tons of websites. We could do primitive maths know how many links one could get if he/she invited 5 people, then they invited 5 people and so on and so forth down to 5-th level when your own link would be shifted upwards up until it disappears from the list completely.
5*5=25*5=125*5=625*5=3125 links. Then summing them all up 5+25+125+625+3125=3905 links!
That was rather much enough to make one in TOP 10 at major search engines on most competitive keywords at that happy time.
However, this genius idea lacked some crucial features.
First of all, not all link exchangers who would be down in your tree, would be from your own niche, which made those links not targeted and that's why not very effective. Say, if you had a 'telephones' website but everybody you invited in your 'tree' was from 'ringtones' industry wouldn't do you much good to be number one on your main niche keywords. This could significantly decrease the whole effect the system was designed for.
Secondly, this system was designed primarily for the search engines optimization, and not for real humans. If there was some way to put those links on a home page in some visible place, that could change the whole picture and beside a 'side effect' of driving traffic from search engines, it could bring targeted and interested live visitors who would be clicking on those links directly!
Thirdly, nobody could be assured that all webmasters abided by the simple rule of removing only the link number one in the ads list and placing their own link number five.
There was a quite spread practice of removing all the links altogether and replacing them with one's own links. That ruined all the benefits of the brilliant MLM approach and interrupted the chain. In other words, no one was sure his partners would abide by the unwritten conversion and there was no control or checking system to capture the cheaters.
Fourthly, all the links had one and the same look, i.e. had one and the same anchor. At that time it didn't matter much when search engines algorithms were not very complicated, but these days you would have been quickly pessimist or filtered for this practice at the (very) least and totally banned in the worst scenario.
Finally, all the pages were looking similar, since people were fairly slow to change the design, though it was clearly and insistently advised to change it to fit the look of one's site.
That's why, it wasn't so hard for search engines to detect those websites which used this technique and somehow pessimism them.
If some one could build a similar system but this time without its main drawbacks, it could change the world of SEO completely. After digging LINKGATOR.NET principles, opening a free account with them and getting a few dozens of links, I derived to conclusion that there might be 'something' in them.
Let's look how LINKGATOR.NET solves the above listed problems.
First of all, by having the centralized database, they now can assure that all link partners follow the single rule and have all the necessary links placed on their websites. Those who cheat are easily caught and punished.
2) They place no limits on the number of anchors of one and the same link, and no limitations on the quantity of links themselves. As long as you have enough balance of their internal currency - GATs one could place as many links/ads as he/she likes. Moreover, one could add some text before and after the anchor.
3) LINKGATOR.NET not only drives traffic from search engines, it gives you live targeted visitors too. So far as your links or ads are placed on their publishers website's home pages, and according to their rules, in some visible area, people indeed do click on them, because the links are highly targeted and this way are interesting for the visitors.
4) I was quite impressed how they solved the problem of niches and maximized the number of targeted links to one's website. It is no secret that you should have as many as possible links coming from your niche to maximize the possibility for the search engines to place you in TOP 10.
So, they give you links not only from partners you refer, but from the whole system evenly. So one could now with no fear bring partners from, say, 'calling cards' niche and promote his/her own 'telecommunication' website.
5) You don't have to change the look and feel of the links pages, since there are none. There's simply no need in them, because all links have to be placed on a home or main page in a prominent area. They also solved the problem of different platforms and operating systems by providing a unified RSS/atom link feed. That's why one could easily place their feed on any site in any programming language.
I found WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Text-Pattern CMS that they support listed on their help page. They also provide a PHP RSS/atom parser script for those websites written in plain PHP.
However, despite all these good things and advantages, there is one flaw in the system. The system is pretty young and does not yet have many users. Though, it depends on from what angle to look at it.
From the 'targetness' point of view, it doesn't have many websites yet from all common niches and categories, but its number constantly is increasing and it seems the time might solve this problem altogether.
From the view point of viral marketing it is good, since you can get more own followers into it and make much exposure of your own website.
Author Resource:-
The Linkgator.net links exchange software can help you to get thousands of links from homepages of related websites fast and for free. Click the following link to learn more about the Link Gator link exchange tool.
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