Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Blog

We recently (today actually) received the question of what we actually do here at AdhocAds. I guess we always thought it was pretty obvious what we do, and therefore we never really bothered to explain it.

For those of you that might not know, we are a text link ad marketplace. We currently have about 600 active publishers, and 300 active advertisers. Many of our advertisers are actually Search Engine Optimization firms that are in charge of building quality backlinks for clients.

Publishers register sites they wish to sell text link ads on. They include a description, price per month, and placement for where the text link ads would be placed. We pre-screen them, categorize them and collect verbose statistics on each site.

Advertisers then can browse our inventory, looking for sites to purchase text link ads on. They can search by category, keyword, and description to find sites that are closely related to the site they wish to advertise. Then they can sort by PR, Alexa, Age of domain, and Google backlinks to find sites that are of high quality.

Any good link building campaign should utilize all methods of link building possible, including (but not limited to) blog commenting, forums posting, social media advertising, directory submission, and text link advertising.

Of the free methods of links building, blog commenting and forum posting are the most popular. But which one is the the most effective? Let's assume for this discussion that both the blog and forum do not use the no-follow tag.

So, you've decided to purchase a few text link ads to give your site a boost in SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages) and increase your organic traffic.

Now you need to know exactly what you're looking for. Of course everyone is infatuated with the almighty PR. And believe me, PR is still important. But there are other important factors to consider as well, some of them are just as important as PR.

Here's my list of the top 6 things to consider when buying a text link ad.

1.) Relevency - Make sure the site is closely related to your own
2.) PR - still a very important factor

A lot of people have this question, the first time they try out Google's 'site:' command, and see that they only have a handful of backlinks according to Google.

They're even more confused when they come here, to www.AdhocAds.com, and see that Google backlinks are one of the dominant statistics we capture about each site in our inventory to determine the quality of the site.

I've even heard it said that we should use Yahoo's site explorer to see all of a domain's true backlinks. This simply isn't true.

Advertisers always look at pagerank when purchasing text link ads. That's a given. And Savvy advertisers know to look at other statistics of a web page as well, like Google backlinks, age of domain, and Alexa rank.

But there is one important factor that is often overlooked, and it could be one of the most important factors of all.

Uniqueness of content, in my opinion, should be one of the strongest factors in determining the link value of any webpage.

We've got two new features this week, making it easier than ever to build quality backlinks for your website or storefront.

Now all listings include 'Age of Site' (determined by WHOIS query) and 'Link Placement', to go along with PR, Alexa rank, and google backlinks. Remember never to rely on PR alone when decide where to buy text link advertisements.

Age of Site displays how old a site is. It only displays the age of the site since it's last drop, so it's easier than ever to spot dropped domains when purchasing your text link ads.

Building links has long been the most essential part of any search engine optimization (SEO) effort. SEO experts found out a long time ago that Google and other mainstream search engines determine the display order of the search result pages based the the relevance and on the popularity of each site in the results. The most relevant, and most popular sites will appear at the top. And over 99 percent of all of the Internet's traffic that comes through search engines, come through clicks form that first page, so, the higher your site appears in that search results, the more traffic you generate. It's no wonder SEO experts everywhere will tell you that building quality backlinks is the key to building traffic

But not just any backlinks will do. As the internet has evolved, so too has Google and other search engines. They've seen reciprocal links spread like wildfire, diluting the importance links to a site. They've seen link farms, and word clouds, and bidding directories gain in popularity, and further deteriorate the quality of their search results. And so, they have adapted. Low quality links from all of these sources have been discounted, and in some cases, even negated altogether.

We've all heard the saying that content is king. Well, there's been a coup. Link Popularity is the new king of search engine optimization. Don't get me wrong, content is still extremely important, and is still the second most important factor in getting your site on the first page of Google for your most important key phrase. But Link Popularity is been proven to be the most important factor, especially on Google. Off page factors, such as the number and quality of websites that link to your website have exceeded the importance other factor found on your own site.

The three most important things in determining link popularity are..
1) The Number Of Incoming Links To Your Website
2) The Quality And Relevancy Of The Links To Your Website
3) The Anchor Text Of The Links To Your Website

The Number Of Incoming Links To Your Website
Simply put, the more links a site has pointed to it, the more popular it is deemed to be. However, it's not always that simple. Links that are 'reciprocal' (they link to you, you link to them) are often discounted. So, it's one way, they link to you links that are important here.

The Quality And Relevancy Of The Links To Your Website
While the sheer number of links that you have pointing to your website is important, it's also important to consider the quality of those links. All links are not equal. Some links are more important than others. A link from the very popular Yahoo would be much more important than a link from a website that just got started yesterday. The more popular the site is that links to you, the more important that link is. Popularity isn't the only consideration though. Relevancy is equally important. You want to be sure that sites that link to you are very similar in subject. A electronics site that links to a health site isn't going to count as much as a fitness sites that links to a health site.

The Anchor Text Of The Links To Your Website
The text that is used to link to your site is also strong consideration in determining link popularity. You want link to you site to be descriptive, easy to read, and have the key phrases that are important to you and that match the key phrases you have optimized your site for.

It's no surprise, it's been happening for over a year now. Google has slowly devalued reciprocal links to the point where they are practically worthless. And they've placed a greater emphasis on quality one way inbound links. They've developed complex algorithms to uncover multi-site triangular linking as well, and they seem hell bent on forcing site owners to consider each backlink they acquire carefully.

So, when you buy text link ads, you need to carefully consider several variables.

1.) Make sure sites you place text link advertisements on are closely related to your own. It used to be that any link was a good one. Now, Google likes to see that the content of the sites linking to yours is closely related. Avoid placing ads on sties that have content on several different topics.

2.) Consider making some of your text link advertisements link to pages other than your homepage. Use some variety in what pages you link to.

3.) Make sure the pages that your link to in your text link ads have your keywords in the URL. For example www(dot)yourdomain(dot)com/keyword.html

4.) Make sure that the ads you buy use your main keywords as the clickable text. I can't tell you how often I've seen text link ads purchased that used the domain name as the clickable text, making the advertisement not as effective as it could be.

5.) Try to use different variations of the clickable text. Instead of always using 'main keyphrase', try using 'Main Keyphrase' and 'main key phrase', and 'keyphrase main'