Linklicious Best Practies One of the more common questions we get is what settings to use for the various link building efforts. It's worth mentioning what we feel are currently best practices for using the service. As with anything you read online, you need to take what you read here and process it through your own knowledge and experience. That said, let's dig in a bit... Link Velocity: Let's start off by hitting this common yet underappreciated ranking factor. As you embark on SEO for a new site you need to examine how strong the existing site is and the current state of the link building effort. In most cases links are not being built at a rapid pace regardless of age. Do you think it may be suspicious if your site gets 20K profile links in a day or two and then no links? Of course! I've killed many a site by building links too quickly. The best practice with building links is generally assumed to be start slowly and ramp up. Slowly means say 50 links a day ramping up over a period of weeks. Is it possible to rank with a few thousand comments/profiles/directory posts made more quickly? Of course. But if you are doing this for a client site and don't want to risk a rank penalty you should really err on the side of being cautious. This plays right into Linklicious. We allow you to control your link velocity, especially when using poorly crawled links. Dump all your links here and we'll spit them out at whatever rate you feel is appropriate. Domain Age/Strength: If your site has been active for several years or has a PR of 3+, it is a strong site. In our experience, virgin strong sites can handle a couple of hundred links a day without suffering a heavy dance or ranking penalty. If a site is new or is poorly linked then you are best being safe and doing 40-60 links/day through Linklicious. Feed Size: Conventional wisdom said that feed sizes of 20 are ideal for Google crawling. What we found was that this is total BS. Google absolutely hates crawling RSS feeds, no matter if they contain 5 links or 100. Google would sometimes crawl one or two links inside, but frequently just sees the links and skips over them. With Linklicious this crawling aversion really doesn't matter because we ping at the link level (for paid accounts) so Google crawls the inside links anyway. RSS feeds are a nice-to-have but aren't needed for you to get credit for your links. If you are a free user you'll want to make the feeds as small as possible and build links to your feeds. Building links to your feeds 'powers them up' and encourages Google to crawl deeper. Obviously we prefer the ping, track, and re-ping approach. Spintext: You have the ability to control the text of your RSS feed to match the links you are pointing to. If you feel it is important, change it up to suit your needs. Multiple Pinging: Mutliple pinging does not help with indexing your links. Once Google knows about your link it decides the importance of the page/link and puts it in the index (or not). This means that once your page is crawled you don't need to ping again. Also, we've not noted any negative effects from multiple pinging. Other Factors: I really don't want this to be a SEO best practice newsletter but it's important to mention topics you should read up on: IP diversity of your links, anchor text diversity, link type diversity, quality vs volume of links, LSI, and the oft overlooked On Page SEO. Experienced SEOs know these topics but if you are just starting out it's important to learn about them. Submissions Run Simultaneously: If I use the default settings for 1000 links today, my links will drip out for 25 days. If I add another 1000 links, the new 1000 links also gets fed out over 25 days. However both submissions will run at the same time, enabling you to stack mutliple clients or runs together at the same time. We don't just push new links on the end of the queue. A Word of Caution: We have had three customers come to us in the past couple of weeks complaining about a heavy Google Dance or ranking penalty. Upon further investigation all three were blasting their links out at a rate of 1000/day or more. If you drip them out at that fast of a rate it's a firehose blasting the site instead of a gentle shower. If this happens you are just asking Google to slap you down. Pushing limits is great, but test out increased linking rates on a throwaway site/page first. Don't get aggressive with your money site unless you are willing to lose it. How We Use Linklicious: You'll love this - we use the default settings for all the links we make including our APIs. Forty links/day is a nice drip feed that lets us know that links are still being fed out for the site and tells Google know that the site is active and worth ranking. It also is slow enough that we can really set-it-and-forget-it. A blast of 2000 links will last 50 days at the default settings which really does free us from bothering with the site for a while. We use the default settings for new sites, old sites, and everything in between. A New API Partner - Linkpushing.net We are really excited to add a new API partner to the mix - Linkpushing.net. These guys have a different approach than other companies. Linkpushing links your money site through a wide variety of link types and does it with a method that leaves no footprint. Instead you get a collection of well organized yet unique web 2.0, article directories, blogs, and other links together. We suggestion you give the service a good look (non-affiliate link) and see if it'll fit with your SEO approach. Linklicious Upgrades! As many of you know, Linklicious is hosted on dedicated servers at Softlayer. We've found them to be reliable and responsive and while very expensive it's quite worth it. As we track SERP results and apply best practice, we realized that we could improve crawl times by cutting down page load times and that has been a huge focus over the past couple of weeks. While we have an ever growing list of cosmetic and informational tasks on our roadmap, our primary goal is to get your links crawled FAST. So speeding the site up for the crawlers has been our focus. Last week we upgraded services to the top of the line boxes. For the tech geeks in the house, let me throw out some specs of our servers: Dual Nehalem Quad Core Xeons Non-Uniform Memory Architecture (NUMA) 24 GB RAM (plenty for now) iSCSI storage (the fastest storage array made today) 1 GigE dedicated port Data center with 100 Gbit connectivity from 8 backbone providers At the same time we rolled out some back office housekeeping items: A new API partner: Linkpushing.net Ability to upgrade and be charged a prorated amount for the current month Ability to downgrade and keep access for the remainder of your paid time Email invoices for subscribers and renewals A few minor cosmetic changes and bug fixes not worth mentioning If you see anything screwy, please shoot us an email so we can hop on it ASAP. We'll wait a couple of days for the dust to settle and should have a very large set of cosmetic changes coming soon. Link hard! Justin     If you would like to unsubscribe please, click here. © Copyright 2010 Linklicious.me 281.482.2572 | [email protected]