Are you a spammer?

I know what you are thinking: “Of course I’m not – I go by the book, providing quality content on my site and getting backlinks in the most ethical way possible.”

Yeah, okay, fair enough. However, if you do any sort of link-building at all, you are artificially inflating your popularity and that is what Google is trying to stop. If you own a site, it’s unlikely that you have never dropped a link somewhere with the intention of appearing more popular in the search engines.

But don’t feel bad, this isn’t something that you created. It is all down to the fact that the search engines really don’t have any way to gauge popularity, other than tallying the amount, and quality, of links you get. Of course, this has lead to wide-spread abuse and attempts to game the system. Unfortunately, if you want any chance at all of competing, you are going to have to play the same game. Read the rest of this entry

If you plan to make money by monetizing traffic to your website, you’re going to have to concentrate on two things: creating high quality, original content – and getting back links to your site. These two work hand-in-hand and must be used together or your website is simply going to flounder in the far recesses of cyberspace forever. No one is ever going to know how great your site is if they can’t find it. Read the rest of this entry