SE’s do not access password protected pages. The only exception is with Google allowing adsense publishers to allow the adsense bots to crawl password protected pages/directories for better relevancy, but that has nothing to do with indexing.

Here’s an example. Go to my Internet Marketing Forum, scroll to the bottom. If you are a member and logged in, be sure to log out. Now click on any user’s profile and you will see that it’s only showing statistics (no user information or external links.) Profile pages can and do still accumulate toolbar PR, but that authority does not get passed to any external links on that page!

This is the case with many forums no matter what software it’s running. vBulletin, SMF and PHPbb are the most popular and every forum I found that runs any of those platforms has either a login in place, or only shows limited information with no external backlinks.

This could very well be the same with non-forum sites, so before you invest in a service that points backlinks to your site(s) from profiles, be sure to check out what type of profile is giving the backlinks and ask for examples so you can see for yourself if external backlinks are showing up without having to be logged in!

From what I’ve found in my own research there seem to be many different opinions as to what exactly constitutes a link wheel… there are many different “types” of them. But the most common is what is shown in the image above.

You have one “money site” which is your content site that you want to rank better in Search Engines for the keywords it targets. So you start a link wheel to do so, which basically consists of leveraging multiple web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, EzineArticles, Blogger etc. by creating pages on each of them, linking them all together to build up authority then link each of them to your site. You can see a good illustration in the image above.

DO THEY WORK? That’s the million dollar question. From an SEO perspective I can definitely say they should and probably DO work. I say they should because it makes sense to me and I say they probably do because in my research ALOT of people have said they do.

So WHY do they work?

It’s pretty basic SEO really. Let’s say there are 4 web 2.0 sites (a, b, c and d) and your money site. To simplify things we’ll say there are only two links on the entire page of each of the web 2.0 sites and we’ll give each of the 4 web 2.0 sites 10 authority “points”. This isn’t realistic, but to prove my point it doesn’t really matter… the same basic principles apply.

So, site A links to the money page and site B. Since authority is split up between links on the page, both pages receive half of the authority. Since our web 2.0 pages each have 10 authority “points” that means site B and the money page each receive 5 authority points. So now site B has 15 authority points instead of 10. So now site B links to the money page giving it 12 1/2 points and site C giving it 17 1/2. Now site C links to the money page giving it 21 1/4 points and site D giving it 18 3/4. Site D links to the money page giving it a total of 30.62 total authority points, which is about three times more authority than it had in the first place.

BUT if you only link to the money page and not to the other web 2.0 sites, each one of them will retain half of the authority points since they aren’t leaking it into the next web 2.0 site, meaning the same amount of authority will flow into the money page in the end.

So do they work? Yes. But I don’t see any reason why a link wheel would be any more effective than if you just link a bunch of web 2.0 sites to your money page, since that authority would be retained and would flow through to the money page.

Link Wheels direct authority around a wheel then into a hub site. That authority would snowball, but it’s the same authority… You can’t create authority out of thin air.

Why I Will Not Be Using Link Wheels

Aside from the primary point I just made (it just doesn’t make sense,) there is one other reason why I will not be doing any link wheels in the future. They are against Google’s TOS, so any “money site” that is the recipient of the link wheel authority is at risk of being flagged by Google. You can read how Google feels about “link schemes” for yourself.

I’m sure some will argue that it’s not a scheme, although to me it’s the epitome of a link scheme… a perfect example. So while a link wheel may very well help you rank your site higher in the SE’s it is risky and to me kind of pointless. I prefer to invest my time, money and resources into more stable and reliable link building techniques.

What do you think? I would love to hear your thoughts on link wheels in the comment field below.

I’ve probably said that 500 times here, there and everywhere. And I don’t say it because I don’t believe the backlinks are worth anything, because they are… I say it because it seems like most people who market with articles are always talking about links, links, links, links.

BUT, I want to bring up this topic once more and talk a little about it.

Yesterday I was submitting a few fresh articles to promote a review site of mine. This, like many of my niche sites, targets several long-tail phrases. These long-tail phrases don’t have huge search volumes with Google, but they have consistent monthly search volumes with some fairly weak competition.

This site in particular, which I will not specify because it is somewhat “risqué” (no, not porn) converts very well, but many of the articles haven’t gained traction in the Search Engines. However, the pages bring in consistent search traffic for the review keywords they are targeting.

However, the only forms of promotion I have used for this site are Link Directory Submissions and Article Directory Submissions. The web directory links certainly helped, but those article directory links are typically a bit stronger and they definitely helped.

This story is similar to several other sites I’ve promoted in the past. Not every article is going to gain traction in the SE’s and not every site is going to be a success. But many times, those sites that are being promoted by articles which don’t drive much traffic, are often times still profitable in the long run simply because of the incoming links the sites have received from those articles pointing to those internal pages targeting long-tail phrases.

So my “updated” thoughts on the whole Article Marketing as a Link Builder can be summed up like this:

My own thoughts on it have not changed at all. It’s really more of the advice that I provide that I want to update. I think over time I’ve kind of pushed the primary benefit too hard, when in reality the link building aspect, in many cases, can be just as important and valuable as the direct traffic you receive as a result of your articles ranking in Google for the keywords they target.

If you’re using article marketing to promote a more authoritative site, which targets keywords that have a good deal of competition, those backlinks aren’t going to be nearly as important as that direct traffic. But if you’re promoting niche sites, which target long-tail, less competitive keywords, those backlinks can still make a pretty noticeable difference and should definitely not be ignored!

The answer to the question is 98% of the time, no. And 2% of the time, yes.

Many people believe that if they build links to the articles that they’ve submitted to article directories, those articles will then receive more authority, causing them to rank higher and drive even more traffic and authority to their site pages. This is true, but it only makes sense to do that about 2% of the time.

To understand why, you need to understand why Article Marketing is worth our time in the first place. The article directories already possess authority, so by submitting articles to them we are able to leverage that authority into traffic and also into incoming authority into our site pages.

If they didn’t possess authority, and you had to build the authority in order for them to drive traffic, they would be completely useless, because if that were the case we would just post the articles to our own site and promote that instead of promoting someone elses site.

So, any authority that we build to any one of our articles in an article directory is authority that we could have built to our own pages. With that being said, if your articles aren’t ranking for the keywords you’re targeting, it isn’t an authority problem, it’s a keyword research problem!!

Article Marketing isn’t meant to get your articles ranked for highly competitive phrases. It’s meant to get your articles ranked for long-tail phrases and if you’re doing good keyword research your articles are going to rank highly for those long-tail phrases without the help of your own link building efforts!

The argument could be made that if an article is ranked at #3 (for example) and that articles is driving traffic to your site, then why not do a little link-building and boost it to #1 for more traffic. That’s a legitimate argument BUT 98% of the time, when targeting long-tail phrases, the difference between the #3, 4, 5, 6 or even 7,8 and 9 spot and the #1 spot isn’t very large. When dealing with highly-competitive, popular phrases the difference can be huge, but with long-tail phrases it’s usually not. And even when it is, you have remember that this isn’t traffic to your site! The article still has to convert that traffic to your site!

Every once in a while though, I’ll hit a long-tail phrase that drives ALOT of traffic to my site without that article even being in the top 3 in the SERPS. This is very rare, happens about 2% of the time, but when it does happen I start building link to that article to get that #1 spot for even more traffic.

So, any time and/or money spent on building links to an article is usually better spent on building links to your own site.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject. Do you build links to your articles? If so, what is your reasoning and how do you justify the time investment?

-edit- Here are a few good points brought up in the comment field below:

Brian says: “Let me ask you this though. If you wanted an article to rank for a more competitive term, not so much long tail, wouldn’t it be easier to get an article on EZA ranked on the first page rather than trying to get a page on your own site ranked on the first page? I believe with some link building to the article that is on EZA, it can rank pretty easy for a more competitive term with some link building to your article. Just my 2 cents.”

MY ANSWER: Yes, it would be easier. But don’t forget, you’re only going to get about 10% of that traffic, at best (usually not even 10%) So you’re sacrificing 90% or more of the traffic.

Andy Beard says: “I am one of the world’s laziest linkbuilders but I really can’t see a problem taking an articlesnatch.com author feed and submitting it to Feedage or maybe a web2.0 site that can take a feed. Content gets buried on large article sites and you want to ensure it remains in the primary index.”

MY REPLY: Good point. Nothing wrong with that at all. My point is time. Doing any kind of automated link building that’s effective and takes very little time certainly isn’t a bad idea. It’s just not worth it if you’re going to spend much time at all doing so.

img credit: Marco Bellucci

There are many ways to make money online. That’s just how it is and once you get through the information overload and develop the knowledge that allows you to understand and separate each model, you start to realize that’s actually a good thing.

However, with all of that considered, there is ONE thing that almost all online business models require and that is TRAFFIC! And where do we find one of the biggest traffic sources online? Yep, search engines, primarily Google. And what is the primary thing that they look at in order rank a page? Yep, links.

Link Building is one of the first things many of us learn about when we start working online because we want as much of that free search engine traffic as possible.

So we find services that do it for us. We submit to link directories. We comment on blog posts. We submit to bookmarking sites etc. etc. and we start to see links coming in. But doing all of this over and over, day after day gets to be pretty time consuming and we get tired of it pretty quickly. So over time we reduce our link building to a few sources, then eventually down to only one or two.

THAT is the mistake! I just read a blog post on this exact topic from someone in this business who I have alot of respect for, Lynn Terry. The post is titled Effective Link Building: One Major Ingredient and I highly recommend you give it a good read. It explains why it’s so important to diversify your link building and offers a good example of how you could promote a good piece of content in order to set it up for success.

Of course this is one of the many things I go over in “The Ultimate Link Building Report” as well. So if you are one of the few who haven’t picked up a copy of that I urge you to do so now (special price through that link.)

img credit: Zach Klein

Even if you’re extremely knowledgeable in your niche, you still need that initial “push” to get your brand out there. After all, how can someone recommend something or link to it if they don’t know it exists, right?

You need links – But how? Below are 5 ways I do it:

1. Article Marketing – I use article marketing primarily as a direct traffic generator, but it’s also a great way to build links. Combined with other techniques, article marketing can add some quality links to a site’s overall backlinks.

2. Blog Networks – There are 2 blog networks I use regularly. I pay a monthly fee for both, although I could probably get away with only using one, but for the large amount of quality links I get in return it’s WELL worth the investment and makes me much more indirectly from the rankings my sites achieve as a result. I use 1WayLinks and occasionally the blog network at FirePow. Both are excellent networks!

3. Web Directories (aka link directories) – Probably the oldest and easiest way to build links easily, yet still effective. You don’t want to get too crazy, but submitting to a handful of quality web directories every day is a great way to gradually build backlinks easily.

4. Forums – I wouldn’t participate in forums JUST to build links, but if you’re going to be participating in them and networking, you might as well get your link(s) in the signature (if they allow it.) They are links and they still count and in many cases they can generate hundreds, even thousands, of links.

5. Participating in the Blogosphere – Commenting on relevant blogs in your niche, guest posting and being part of the community. This is a GREAT way to network, but it’s also yet another link builder and can even be a solid means of direct traffic.

Of course there are many other link building techniques, but these are some of the most frequently used and effective. But remember, nothing you do online, or offline for that matter, will amount to anything if you aren’t persistent! Everyone fails. What separates winners from losers is their willingness to keep going when they face failure!

If it seems like your building links and building links, but haven’t seen good results, that just means you’ve come to a brick wall… the same brick wall that just about everyone else came across when they started building links! Don’t quit and you WILL get over that wall!

img source: brentdanley

I like showing you this site because it’s proven several SEO myths that are taught by so-called SEO experts wrong. One of them is that manual linking is no longer effective! 98% of the links pointing to that site are a result of some form of manual linking! If you do a link check, you’ll see that most of the links are from:

- web directories
- article directories
- Reciprocal Linking
- forums and blogs
- my own sites

And what’s really cool about this is that I haven’t touched that Website for over a year! I haven’t built links, added content, nothing! Some of the content on the site is duplicate content too. The only thing I have done is something most SEO “Experts” will tell you is a bad idea and that is changing the template of the whole site. I changed the template of the entire site, so it looks better, several months ago and the typical traffic pattern stayed the same.

So does manual link building still work? 5,000 unique visitors per month tell me it does

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later addition
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Just to be clear, when I say “manual linking” I’m referring to anything you do manually, which results in an incoming link. The opposite of manual linking is natural linking, which is when others link to your sites and pages because they simply like it.

I’m not saying natural linking is not effective. Natural linking is the best kind of linking!! BUT, for some sites you just need to give them a push and I want to make it clear that there is nothing wrong with doing this, as long as it’s in moderation!

The first and possibly most important thing I’ll say about link building is that you shouldn’t be spending your valuable time seeking out top-secret pages that give followed links!

Sure, you could probably find some, but in most cases the time investment isn’t nearly worth it. Most of the time these “top secret” high PR pages aren’t nearly as valuable as you think and how long did it take you to find it? It’s just not worth it. The time you spend searching could have been used more effectively!

Instead, spend your time executing some or all of the known link building techniques:
- writing good content that invites links (natural linking)
- article marketing
- reciprocal linking
- guest blogging
- creating WordPress themes, tools and other applications that others can embed onto their site with a link to your site.
- leveraging pre-existing sites

etc.

If it’s tough for you to obtain links on authoritative sites don’t worry about it! I guarantee you could obtain more overall authority with 10 or so incoming links from pages of low authority in ONE day than you could with one page of good authority in a week or more!

The average internet marketer with less than a year of experience, and some with more than that, spends ENTIRELY too much time looking for gold mines and top secret methods. Those who concentrate on the known methods, work hard and never give up, are the ones who get those top 10 rankings sooner!

Something that I wish more people understood is this: ALL of the information that you need to be successful online is out there and you’ve probably already heard 99% of it multiple times! Don’t waste your time looking for shortcuts and goldmines! Whether it’s link building, traffic generation or anything else, concentrate on known methods and take action!

photo credit: Cristina

The process was pretty easy and it actually worked! This was my primary link building technique when I first started online and I actually obtained many somewhat competitive rankings with Google.

That was then and this is now!

This type of reciprocal linking is no longer effective and can actually accrue penalties toward your website(s.) Google and other SE’s can very easily find these pages and discount them. But, that doesn’t mean all reciprocal linking is ineffective!

Google states on their “link schemes” page that “Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)” is in violation of their Webmaster guidelines. Notice the word “excessive” being used twice in there.

This means that selective link exchanges between quality sites is not against their guidelines and whether it is or not I can tell you for a fact that it does work!

The “blogosphere” is a perfect example of this. Analyze any “A-list” blog and I almost guarantee that 50% or more of the outgoing links are to sites that have linked to them sometime in the past…that’s a reciprocal link!

What Constitutes a “Good” Link Exchange?

The first thing to understand is that a “resources” page should not contain hundreds of links. I don’t even have a page like this on most of my sites, but those that do contain very few links. I only use these pages as kind of a bonus “I’ll give you a link “here” too.”

The best way to do a link exchange is contextual. Links that appear within content are much more “natural” looking than sidebar and footer links.

You’ll obviously want to insure that the site you’re linking to is not in a “bad neighborhood” and doesn’t use any kind of “black-hat” tactics.

A contextual link on a good page that is receiving some authority is considered, in my opinion, a good link exchange.

Another thing I like to do is triangular links where site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C completes the triangle by linking to site A. This requires you have other sites that you can use to leverage the trade, but it’s very effective. I wrote more about that in a previous post titled “Leveraging Pre-Existing Sites to Build Authority.”

All-in-all I’ve been able to get many of my own sites ranked pretty highly to this day with selective link exchanges. It’s becoming harder and harder to find others who will accept these trades, but if you’re persistent and can write a convincing, personal, non-spammy email to them you have a good chance of obtaining these links.

Also, when attempting to do a link exchange with a site that has much more authority than yours, it’s important to balance the trade. Offering a unique article or multiple links in return for one link on their more authoritative site will often work.

Combine selective link exchanges with a solid article marketing campaign and you’ll see higher rankings!

photo credit: mikemindel

If one really dug down deep, they could probably say that link building is actually unethical because you’re manually boosting the incoming links to your site, which influences the sites rankings in the SE’s. But if you know your site contains great content, it just needs visitors, is it unethical? I don’t think so!

You Probably Have Alot To Offer And Don’t Realize It

In the past few years I’ve built up a pretty big inventory of Websites. While they are all white-hat, some retain traffic while others don’t, some are well optimized while others aren’t and some I feel have more potential than others. However, all of them that aren’t brand-new possess a certain amount of authority and value. If they’re indexed in the SE’s and have any rankings at all they have value and they possess the power to pass authority through linking!

Understanding What People Want

This is easy. People want to receive more than they provide. It’s kind of crappy, but it’s a fact of life. I’m sure this is true for all of us. Some of us don’t mind helping someone out, but the majority won’t even respond unless they get something out of it.

What To Do With That Unused Authority

Use it to give more than you receive! — I love big, juicy site-wide links. Although Google doesn’t like them as much as they did in the past, they are still very valuable and can increase your incoming links by the thousands with one simple link.

So what do I do? I want to build links to mysite.com so I offer a site-wide link on one of my other sites that I don’t promote anymore, but still passes authority. Just because I don’t promote it any longer doesn’t mean it offers worthless links! This site should at least have most of it’s pages indexed by the SE’s so those links count. Since I know it’s probably still not a fair trade I also offer 3 or 4 single page links on another of my sites with their choice of anchor text.

They get a site-wide link on one site plus 3 or 4 individual links on another and all I’m asking for is one little link in their sidebar, which happens to appear on all of their thousands of pages.

Seems simple enough, but it’s very effective. The idea of leveraging several sites with a little authority to build one site with alot of authority is extremely effective.

I’ve just begun using pretty much the same technique to get my new Article Directory going and I’ve used a similar technique to promote the main directory of this site, which now ranks on the front page of Google for Make Money Online.

This is an excellent way to use the authority you’ve built up in dormant sites to build authority in those sites you now actively promote, while avoiding Reciprocal Linking.