LinksManager.com Blog

What is a linking policy? A simple statement, generally not more than one or two sentences long, explaining what types of linking requests you will accept and what types you won’t.

Why do you need it? Technically, you don’t. Though an increasing number of webmasters are including linking policy statements on their sites, the vast majority of websites in the world still don’t have one. But that doesn’t make it any less of a good idea.

If it’s not absolutely necessary, what makes it a good idea?

Well, it may discourage a few people from bothering you with inappropriate link requests . Not to many, because most people who send unacceptable link requests don’t spend a lot of time looking at the sites they proposition. But it will discourage some bogus queries and it will also give you something to point to when people whose requests you deny pester you for an explanation.

But that’s only the secondary reason for posting a simple, brief, concise linking policy on your site. The primary reason is because it sends a very positive message to anyone considering offering a quality link, a beneficial link that could drive traffic to your site and improve your search-engine page rank.

High-quality links all have one thing in common, they originate from high-quality websites. Sites do not have to be unethical to be a poor link partner. A link can be relevant, located at a good address and in total compliance with good web practices and still be a terrible addition to your link page if it comes from a bad website. Not an evil website, not a dishonest website, just a bad one. A site with illiterate grammar, terrible spelling, ugly graphics and an overall trashy ambiance.

Giving your customers a link to a bad site negatively reflects on your site. We are all, like it or not, judged by the company we keep – in real life and in the virtual universe. So operators of good sites tend, just like you, to be very picky about whose links they add. They do take a close look at sites requesting links from them and they will notice your linking policy and be reassured to find that you are just as particular about who you allow on your site as they are.

What you put in your linking policy depends on your site and your personality. For some people, a statement that sites requesting a link must contain relevant content useful to your visitors is enough. In other cases, if your site is highly specialized for example, you might want to specify the “relevant” content, as in “This site accepts and exchanges links solely with other professional websites centered on international immigration law.”

You might also make limiting link exchanges to a one-to-one ratio part of your official policy. Trading one link on your site for a link on two other sites might sound appealing, but people who offer those deals generally do it because it’s the only way they can harvest any reciprocal links for their sub-standard sites.

Finally, if you have any particular policy that you’ve been enforcing unofficially – such as linking only to sites that provide content links – you should include that as part of your formal linking policy. This not only will save you the time and effort of explaining it to people, it will alert webmasters who follow the same policy that you are a potentially excellent link partner.

The genesis of this post, BTW, is kind of interesting.  We were browsing some webmaster resources and came across an article from a web consultant who said he was in the process of adding a link policy statement to over 1,000 of his own and his clients’ pages.

In addition to reminding us how important link policy statements can be, he also provided real-world proof of the thesis that not every relevant link is a good link.  We’d like to share a bit of what the article said, but we won’t be able to credit the author because his or her name was missing on the page we saw.  (If you recognize your words quoted here, please drop us an email so we can update this with your name.)

He (we’ll assume the writer is male because that’s the archaic way high school English teachers told us to handle such gender issues) writes about trying to buy links from a “text link broker” and how he asked this supposedly “reputable broker” to substantiate the value of his links with examples of websites whose PR went up after spending $1000 or more buying a package of allegedly relevant links.

“He said, ‘we don’t keep track of that sort of thing,’ ” the poster writes, noting that he had to “pick my jaw up from the floor” after hearing that ridiculous non-answer.

The absurdity continued.

“I pointed out to him that they (the links offered for sale) were all on very close IP addresses and clearly resided on the same virtual server, he seemed not to understand when I asked if they couldn’t offer more variation in IP address range to avoid a link farm penalty from the search engines.”

Once again we’d like to thank this unknown poster for giving us the idea for this blog entry and for providing a perfect example of another way in which links that may be relevant and may not by themselves live in bad neighborhoods can be unhealthy for your site – in this case because they are part of a suspect network whose members live too close to each other for comfort.

With LinksManager, we provide webmasters with a editor-based, ethical-by-design process for eliminating much of the tedious, time-consuming grunt work of managing a link exchange campaign.  And on LinkPartners.com we provide a free – even to non-LinksManager subscribers — directory of sites seeking link partners that have been visited and approved by one of the humans on our staff.  Still, the ultimate responsibility for the quality and effectiveness of your links lies with you.  For links, as for all your other content, you make the rules and you are in charge of enforcing them.

Publishing your linking rules as a public policy is a great way to let the web community know you are serious about giving your customers and other site visitors as rich and rewarding an experience outside your site as you do on the inside.

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Here at LinksManager, we get alot of questions about content.  How and who to write it are daily questions we get here about content.  So about six months ago, our parent company, CNVI, decided to produce a copywriting service for webmasters.  GetWebContent.com, our customized solution for your website content needs, is finally here.

GWC offers relief from so many customer-retention and SEO-related problems – we’re tempted to call it the greatest web service since AOL gave every man, woman and child in America free coasters to rest their Starbucks’ mugs and martini glasses on. GWC provides a fast, easy, cost-effective way to constantly expand and update your site with professionally written, search-engine-optimized articles, blogs, product descriptions, “home page” and “about us” copy, and anything and everything else involving words.

Words. The most important of all the elements on your website.

Words.

People will buy products based on nothing but a compelling description, they won’t buy one illustrated by a picture without any explanatory text.

Words.

The only thing on the visible part of your site Googlebot and other web crawlers pay attention to. Search engine spiders couldn’t care less whether your images are Pulitzer-prize winners or dark and out of focus.

Words.

Rudyard Kipling called them “the most powerful drug ever devised by mankind.”

If the words on your site aren’t working at maximum efficiency, your site will not – cannot — generate maximum profit. GetWebContent delivers new, professionally written, relevant copy about your site and products.  Web copy that will win you sales and influence search engines.  Our full-time, experienced writers are also available to polish, sharpen and search-engine optimize your existing web content, write your press releases and white papers, and help you create on and offline print or multimedia advertising.

You may be wondering what makes GetWebContent different from other web content and copywriting services.  Five things, actually.

1.  Our stuff is better than their stuff.  Our writers are full-time professionals who scribble for Fortune 500 companies and agencies like Panasonic, Honda, Fuji, International Brands, Dailey and Associates and Dentsu Communications when they’re not writing for you.

2. None of our copy is pre-written, generic boilerplate. It is all written specifically to your order and fully compliant with search-engine relevancy and freshness guidelines.

3. Your copy remains exclusively yours.  You own it.  You can do what you want with it.  You can sell it or line your birdcage with it.  You can give it away.  You can auction it on Ebay.  You own the copyright.  We will never resell, recycle or license website copy we have written for you to anyone else. Nor will we ever try to foist copy we’ve produced for someone else off on you.

4. GetWebContent is incredibly easy to use. Using a control panel very similar to the one you may be familiar with from LinksManager, you log onto your account, tell us what you want, and wait (not very long) for a call from one of our writers.  After you and the writer agree on exactly what you want your copy to say and the price, the writer will send you a written proposal to sign off on. From there, you concentrate on running your business while the writer concentrates on producing your content.  In four or five business days your project will be done and you can either post it on your website or send it back to us for any requested revisions.

5. Numbers “2″ and “3″. Why are numbers two and three together one of the top five reasons you should select GetWebContent over its competitors?

Let’s answer that with a question. Do you know what the four most important words Hippocrates ever wrote are? (Even though they are not, as commonly believed, part of the Hippocratic Oath.)  If you said “first do no harm,” you’re right.

Buying web content from a typical copy farm or content mill can do incalculable harm to your website by throwing it under the wheels of Google’s patented “similarity engine” and other search engines’ duplicate-content recognition technologies.

By maintaining data warehouses of pre-fabbed articles, by selling the same stories to multiple buyers all over the world, copy farms ignore the three major content guidelines of all the major search engines – relevancy, originality and freshness.  Since their content is not handcrafted for each customer’s site, it is at best half-heartedly relevant.  Appearing on numerous sites destroys its claim to originality and puts it in the negative category of duplicate content and being sold repeatedly for months and years guarantees that it stays stale instead of fresh.

This is good for the bottom-feeding word mongers who get to cash in on the same old stuff over and over again and horrible for their customers, who are the people destined to suffer any search-engine wrath over the obsolete, duplicate copy.

Thus the importance of number two — “none of our copy is pre-written, generic boilerplate … it is all written specifically to your order “– and number three – “we will never resell, recycle or license website copy we have written for you to anyone else.”

At GetWebContent, as at LinksManager and LinkPartners, we exist for one reason only, to help grow your business and ours by providing top-quality solutions that operate in strict compliance with internet best practices and search-engine guidelines.

Would you like to see an example of GetWebContent’s work?  You just did.  This blog was written by one of our copywriters.

If your website is in need of fresh content, head over to GetWebContent.com and give it a try.  Your website will thank you.

Press release can be found here:  http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/1/prweb496352.htm

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As the song says, it’s that time of year when the world starts to sing – and starts to think about New Year’s resolutions.

Believe or not, New Year’s resolutions are not some post-Freudian manifestations of the modern world’s obsession with self improvement.  Some experts believe the custom actually predates the Gregorian calendar and Christmas itself, having its roots in ancient Babylon where farmers traditionally began the new year by resolving to return all the plows and scythes they’d borrowed from their friends, neighbors and relatives months or years earlier.  The idea was that whatever they did on the first day would affect their fortunes for the entire year.  (Which, since it was based on a lunar calendar with “New Year’s Day” being the first New Moon after the Vernal Equinox, varied in length from one year to the next.)

Early Christians, it is said, changed New Year’s Day from a day of forward planning (“I will return that butter churn’) to one of introspection and assessment of the past year’s actions (“Why haven’t I returned that butter churn?”)  Later on, of course, the concept changed again and the ancient Babylonian practice of making resolutions was re-established, much to the joy of generations of standup comics who were able to ignite cheap laughs with just about any reference to New Year’s resolutions and their inevitable and ignominious failure.

New Year’s resolutions aren’t predestined to fail, however.  If the resolution is a sound one and the resolver is truly motivated, they can be extraordinarily useful in getting the year off to a good and prosperous start.

So here’s our suggestion for a great New Year’s Resolution for all of us: Let’s take a close look at our websites, note the points that need improvement, and get to work strengthening them.

Maybe you haven’t added any new copy to your site in quite awhile.  You know you need a steady stream of new and updated copy to keep your site interesting to customers and fresh and vital in the eyes of search-engine web crawlers, but maybe you don’t have time for it and, even if you did, you’re not a professional writer and wouldn’t know what to say and the best ways to say it on a week after week, month after month schedule.

If that’s a problem with your site, we have a solution.  One of our New Year’s resolutions is to offer you the best web content creation service on land, sea or in cyberspace and that service – GetWebContent.com — is now up and running producing robust content for webmasters, such as this blog entry you are reading right now.

Also, as part of the resolution to improve your site, take a hard look at your link strategy and the ways in which you are using LinksManager.  Out of the box, LinksManager is amazingly effective at guiding you down the path of link exchange righteousness to the land of traffic generating, search-engine-friendly linking.  But it is also far, far more than that.  LinksManager contains features and addons, all of them absolutely free that can do everything from making your link pages shine graphically to automatically putting timely sales offers into the anchor text displayed on your link partners’ sites.  If you’re not already using them, resolve to at least check out such LinksManager exclusives as:

LinkBlogs — LinkBlogs are one of the latest and greatest LinksManager innovations.  Combining the power of link exchange and blogging, LinkBlogs automatically update the anchor text describing your site to introduce new products, promote special offers and discounts, or broadcast the latest news about your company in virtual real time.

Linklets — Simply put, LinksManager’s proprietary Linklets technology allow you to smash the chains restraining conventional link publishing and elevate your linking program to levels far beyond those attainable with any other linking technology.  Use Linklets to publish all of your links on one page bypassing the traditional directory format.  Or create “AdWords”-style text ads on your site, generate rotating banner links, produce featured “link of the day” popup windows and empower a host of other link enhancements limited only by your imagination. 

Highlight New Links — Attach an original or stock image to newly uploaded links to alert site visitors that you have added more resources to your site.  Accessible via the “New! Graphic” link on your LinksManager Control Panel, this control even lets you select how many days the “new link” graphic displays before being automatically removed.

Advanced Cosmetic Controls — If you are still designing your link pages using the “novice” cosmetic-control setting, you might resolve to at least take a look at what’s available to you under the “advanced” setting in the Cosmetic Control section of your Control Panel.  Among other things, Advanced Cosmetic Controls allows you to use HTML headers and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to produce styled link pages a Fortune 500 design agency would be proud of.   And LinksManager staff will help you with advanced cosmetic controls at no additional charge – full service support is part of your LinksManager subscription so we suggest you take advantage of that in the new year.

Custom Mailers – If you have not discovered custom mailers yet, check it out.  Custom mailers allow you to send custom crafted email notifications to link partners.  Custom mailers come in handy when you need to communicate housekeeping changes such as the location of your links pages or a response to a webmaster when you decline the link exchange for a specific reason.  Custom mailers require staff editorial approval.  The LinksManager Helpdesk can help you craft custom mailers to optimize communications for your link exchange strategy. 

The above list constitutes just five of the many advanced ways in which LinksManager can be used to raise the profile and increase the effectiveness of your links as they appear on your link partners’ sites and your partners’ links as they appear on yours.  If you haven’t recently logged into your LinksManager account and checked to make sure that everything is set up exactly the way you want, this is probably a great time to do so.

And, in between making resolutions (and probably breaking a few) and returning any borrowed farm equipment you might have laying around, have A GREAT NEW YEAR!

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