I publish several blogs about legal topics and have done so for several years. My Atlanta bankruptcy blog, for example, has been around since 2005 and contains close to 300 posts. It has a very solid search engine presence and links from this provide a significant amount of “link love” for the recipient.
Almost weekly, I get emails from blog or web site owners that go something like this:
I am in the process of developing a more substantial online presence. I noticed your blog and that it receives a lot of traffic, and am wondering whether you would be interested in a reciprocal link arrangement whereby we link to your blog and website and, in return, you link to our website on your blog. Our site is at _____. We will be adding a “Resources” page that will include links and brief descriptions of useful sites for bankruptcy information, and would include a reference to your blog on that page.
Here is how I read this message: “Hello, you do not know me but I see you have an established blog that has been around for 5 years, appears regularly in the organic search results and has a high Google PageRank. I have a new website that has a few pages of content and has not yet been indexed by Google, Yahoo or Bing. I want you to give me a site wide blogroll link from your site to help put my site on the map. In exchange, I’ll put you on a “links” page on my site, when I get around to adding such a page. I sincerely hope you don’t know that “links” pages are ignored by the search engines, meaning that a link from a “links” page is totally worthless.”
Not surprisingly, asking for a link from an established site when you have nothing to trade is a waste of your time and it is a waste of your potential link partners’ as well.
Similarly, if your site still contains a “links” or “resources” page, you are shouting to the world that you do not know what you are doing and/or that your linking tactics are vintage 1990. With very few exceptions, “links” pages have no search engine value. Next time you see one, look at the PageRank indicator on your Google Toolbar (or at PageRankLookup) you can check for yourself.
So what should you do if you have a new site? Here are a few suggestions that would work for me:
- if you have another, more established site, offer a link from that site
- offer to write an article for your target site – but make sure that your article has some relevant, meaty content. If you really want to impress your target’s editor, offer to write a second article that you will include on your site that contains a link back to your target’s site
- if you have friends or colleagues who have established blogs, ask if they will accept a post (written by you or by your target) that contains a link back to the target
- offer to write an article for the benefit of your target for EzineArticles.com or another major article directory. Even better, offer to write several articles for multiple article directories
- offer to bookmark several of your target’s blog posts on one or more social bookmarking sites.
- offer to write reviews for Google local, Kudzu, Avvo if applicable
- offer to pay for the link back to your new site
- offer to distribute video content on behalf of your target on TubeMogul
- offer to record and produce a screen capture video for your target
- offer to translate (or have translated) one or more pages of your target’s site into Spanish or another language
- offer to write and set up an autoresponder series for your target on AWeber or Constant Contact
- offer to buy 50 stock photo credits at iStockPhoto or another stock photo site
- offer to locate 5 or 10 badges for your target’s blog – badges are seals that look like awards that may help a blog’s credibility
- offer to record an interview with your target and to provide target publisher with the audio file
Generally, put yourself in the shoes of a busy blogger – what can you do to help your target blog publisher save time? Any other ideas about what a new site owner can offer an established site owner to justify a valuable link?
by Jonathan Ginsberg 
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