Photo/Video Backlinking Project

[Tim Gilbertson]

Hi everyone,

I've developed a backlinking project for photographers and videographers. Basically you submit your info to the website, and it creates a .html file with links to other photographers for you to upload to your website. You then link to that .html file from your homepage. The link can be sneaky by giving it innocuous anchor text like "Copyright 2012," but it has to be on your homepage. Make sure it's where you say it is, though. Because a bot will randomly inspect to make sure.

You then get backlinks to your website through the same system. Pretty cool eh? Nobody links to anyone that is linking to them, and everyone gets 13 links. A nice little SEO boost.

This should be within the confines of Google's best practices. It's along the lines of a webring.

This is still in testing, so please tim@papertigermedia.ca me with any bugs. Don't post them on here, it'll just get too confusing. Thanks!

Welcome to Infinitelink!

[Doug Bailey]

Hi Tim,
Please forgive me, but with the greatest of respect, I think this may backfire.

I'm not trying to be controversial and I'm not an SEO expert by any means, but I have spent the past several months intensely learning as much as I can about how search engines work & SEO. In particular I've been studying how SEO video impacts a web pages rankings. This is important from a business practice standpoint. Is it a selling point for video? Yes, if it's done correctly. I'm still working on that & would love others to chime in.

Search engines are well trained by now to sniff out and punish suspicious activity by pushing you to the bottom of the rankings

Backlinks are very important, but the quality and status of the backlink is critical. For example if Amazon.com has a SERP of 9/10 (they do) and they honor you with a backlink, that's quite a big deal. If I give you a backlink from my crummy unimportant 1/10 site that really doesn't help you. Backlink "farms" can do more harm than good. Just a thought meant very kindly.

I've spent the entire day making my home page more SEO friendly and will be interested to track the results a few months from now.

You are very welcome to disagree with this rookie, and one day I might even know what I'm talking about (smile).

So much to learn, so little time.

With kind regards,
Doug.
BaileyNatureGallery

[Tim Gilbertson]

The difference between this and a link farm is the quality of websites. Link farms are generally populated by websites designed only for creating backlinks. This system creates content more akin to a blog post, or a resources page.

If this were giving people 100 links I think Google would be suspicious, but 13 links would be fine. What separates this from a webring?

There are other similar systems operating (see SEO For Photographers - Link Exchange Coopertative) that have been operating for years with stellar results.

[Chris Davis]

Originally Posted by Tim Gilbertson

The link can be sneaky by giving it innocuous anchor text like "Copyright 2012," but it has to be on your homepage.

That kind of behavior may get you blacklisted on Google.

Originally Posted by Tim Gilbertson

What separates this from a webring?

Perhaps nothing, and that's a problem in itself. Being part of a webring will no longer improve your rankings. Google's current method of ranking sites completely discounts webrings. For the most part, SEO quality goes down when site links are reciprocated.

Google (and all other search engines) have become very sophisticated. It's virtually impossible to "fool" them into ranking your site higher than it deserves. The best way to attain a high ranking is to regularly update your site with relevant, original content.

[Tim Gilbertson]

Originally Posted by Chris Davis

For the most part, SEO quality goes down when site links are reciprocated.

Absolutely true. However, no link is reciprocated. The idea is there, but the program links no page with a page directly linking back. A>B>C>D>A

But yes, you'll see that your SEO in many regards is minimal compared to quality content. Our ratings are boosted much more efficiently every time we publish a blog post. New content means boosted keywords, as well as often creating 'snail' keywords you may have never thought someone would ever search for.