Well, you thought a week was going to go by and I wouldn’t get a post done, didn’t you? I’ve actually been thinking about this one for some time now, since I wrote last week’s update regarding AdSense and monetizing your traffic. I truly believe that the best way to make honest money from a website is to give visitors only two options when they leave- either click the red “x” and close out the browser window, or click a link that will pay you or at least has the potential to pay you.
Now for all those links on the far right hand side of this page, let me explain. They are part of a traffic-trading program called The Traffic Link. If you want to learn more, you can click here- by the way this one isn’t an affiliate link! Basically, the program is a simple traffic-trading script that generates 3-way or a-b-c link trades among participants. A simple link trade, called a 2-way trade or an a-b trade, is where site a links to site b, and site b links back to site a. The 3-way, or a-b-c trade is where site a links to site b, and site c links back to site a. The reasoning behind the a-b-c trade it is that Google sees a two-way or a-b link as a “trade”, and that has less value toward increasing your site’s PageRank than does a one-way link. And a 3-way or a-b-c link is seen by the Google spiders as two separate one-way links. And when we look at ways to increase the PageRank, and eventually get your site seen as more relevant to Google and therefore get listed higher on the natural search results and make millions and retire early, a good linking structure is a very important part of that. But bear in mind, PageRank is but one of some 200 factors that the Googlebots look at when determining search results, so PageRank is not the be-all end-all of a website. There is some good information on what the Google webmasters have to say about PageRank, and I’d highly recommend you read it here. This one here is my personal favorite.
So now that I have seemingly contradicted myself in terms of PageRank- what to do? The purpose of all those links over there are to try to “impress” the GoogleBots and increase my rankings with The Almighty Google. But they are a MASSIVE traffic leak, and no source of income whatsoever. The jury is still out on whether they stay or go, and today I’m leaning towards go. But I have yet to make up my mind entirely, we will wait and see if they are doing more harm than good. I am watching very carefully at Google WebMaster Tools, and there will be a decision coming very soon.
The moral of the story is to build a good website that is useful to visitors, update it frequently with unique content, get links from relevant sites and link to relevant sites, and leave the rest of it up to the Google algorithms. A friend on a message board that I frequent said it best, “The way to make Google think you have the best ____ site on the Web is to get up off your ass and actually build the best ____ site on the Web!”
