the strongest link

[sess4561]

what do you feel is the strongest type of link?

a. a simple link on a blogroll "my keyword".

b. a blog comment on site containing "my keyword".

c. a semantic link on a blog. ie a 300 word article with "my keyword" included in the body text.

I know a lot of other factors play a part in this, ie outgoing links etc.

But lets assume its the same blog for a,b and c.

[MASSEY]

That would be C, why, do you think otherwise?

[seo next]

The first thing here is what do you mean by the strongest ? The one which gives you the most benefit ?
From my observations instead of the strongest links its the right mixture of strong and weak links which helps.

[dots and spots Jeff]

IMHO the order would be, from strongest to weakest,

c

a

b

Jeff

[sess4561]

i just wanted to see what everyone thought really.

I have been doing a bit of testing with my own blogs, and a customers site.

I have 50 article blogs, mostly pr5, and have added an article to one of the customers pages with 3 keywords in, and on another blog, with the same set up and pr etc, i have added 4 comments on relevent articles, and a blogroll link.

I'm still waiting to see my findings, but so far, test A looks to be the stronger of the two, with the semantic text around the keywords.

[dots and spots Jeff]

I'm still waiting to see my findings, but so far, test A looks to be the stronger of the two, with the semantic text around the keywords.

Interesting.

Could it be that the 'blogroll' link has more 'permanence & presence'? The link in the article only appears in that one article, but the blogroll link appears on all blog posts/instances of the blog.

I don't know - and I'm no expert - but thanks for sharing this with us.

Do keep us posted as your experiment continues.

Jeff

[sess4561]

sorry. by test A, I meant 3 links in an article.

test B = blogroll with link appearing on 10,000+ pages.

blogroll = more links but not working as well as 1 article with 3 links!

within 2 weeks customers site has appeared second page for target keywords from test A, Test B is page 7 or 8.

So it looks like 1 article link is far more valuable than that of a blogroll link.

The old saying "quality over quantity" seems to be true.

[dots and spots Jeff]

I'm a little confused now!:eek::|:)

To clarify:

So the test with the links within an article (Test C in your first post?) is performing better than the blog roll post (Test A in your original post?)

Could you confirm the above!

Thanks

Jeff

[eventdomain]

Forget this blog and article crap, what you want are links that are related to your own site (I mean that's an ideal link, but you'll end up getting general links, bcos there's more websites of this nature). This ensures that vistors landing on your homepage will convert more easily.

For links, hopefully on sites with significant traffic flow, you've no choice but to pay I'm afraid. You'll find out as you go about swapping links, many just won't even reply to link swaps now.

Link value depends on the authority of sites its placed on, basically you want resource websites to begin with and they'll be cheaper than search engines for sure.

You might be able to pick up links for £10 or so, its worth scouting for those in Google and I found a local one a few months back and didn't hesitate to buy. These are few though, so you'll likely end up with links costing around the £30 upwards mark, but that's pretty good for what some actually give away.

[fisicx]

I have 50 article blogs, mostly pr5
Confirm that every post is PR5 or just the homepage?

But bacdk to your question: it all depends.

A blogroll link from the the NY times is going to have more influence than link in an article on my mum's knitting blog with a readership of 7.

Blog comments have just about zero value. You might get a tiny advantage if you comment daily on every single do-follow blog you can find but there are far easier ways to help your ranking.

If you are just blogging in order to add a link and there is no real focus to the post categories then google is be confused. Relevance is the key and 100 blog posts each on a different subject looks false and may well be given less credence that a smaller number of highly focussed posts with supporting links rather than promoting links.

[sess4561]

jeff thats right, sorry for the confusion.

[sess4561]

fiscx. Just the homepage is PR5, other pages vary.

As far a relation to the customers site, the blog is an article blog, mainly in the same sector as my clients site.

As far as traffic goes, Alexa ranking is 275,500.

It's working great with posting articles with links in, flying through the rankings!

[fisicx]

Cool.

Not saying the methods won't work it's just that you can't say one is any better then another.

So what TBPR score do the posts have?

[sess4561]

well top 10 posts instantly appear on the homepage, so they get tbpr of 5 instantly, once they fall off the homepage and into the catagories, they are showing as 2 and 3's for older ones.

[UKSBD]

I set a test up with a brand new page.
Set just 1 link to it from a blog post and not only was the blog post indexed within 1 minute, the brand new page was crawled and cached too.

I then set up another brand new page.
Made another post (which was indexed within a minute) but this time didn't provide a link to the new page, but instead linked to the new page from the blog roll.
Again the new page was picked up within 1 minute

Neither of the new pages appear in the SERP's yet
I will post back which one appears first.

[eventdomain]

Blog comments have just about zero value. You might get a tiny advantage if you comment daily on every single do-follow blog you can find but there are far easier ways to help your ranking.

Exactly, couldn't have put it better myself. But why is everyone so concerned with climbing the SERPS, bcos its free? but it's not free, as the cost is masses of time for little gain.

Businesses are better off seeking out cheap weblinks on highly targetd websites, and that will get you the right traffic for low cost. These links will be for longer placement periods than any PPC, and will be far cheaper.

But it does involve legwork, heck, if you're going to waste your lives hitting useless blogs, then might as well hit the search engines and find the little gems of portal sites that ARE out there. Know what I'm saying.....

[NWBUS]

I read the the replies, now very confused.. I am going to do all 3...! lol

[UKSBD]

Quick follow up from my test above:

The 1st page is now appearing in the serps.
(the test with the link in the body text of the article)

The other page is not appearing in serps.
(test with link in blogroll)

There was an hours difference in the two tests, so will wait another hour to see if the 2nd page appears in SERP's too.

[UKSBD]

Another update for anyone interested,

2nd page appeared in the serps a couple of hours later, both pages have
the same made up word on them and the 1st page (one with link from body text of article) appears stronger.

Whether this is because of the link or the fact it was set up earlier we don't know yet.

I will set the opposite test up tomorrow to see.

[DayTrader]

It would be:
A - it will be stong on a relevant blog
C - on a relevant blog with incontent link is good
B - blog comment - please don't spam me. Even google now are stamping on the comments abuse. Even though they help their value is diminishing.

When google announced that they were going hard on comments some people lost their rankings. Thus as advised before it's a good idea to diversify and have a bit from everywhere.

[UKSBD]

Another update:

The 2nd page (the one with the link from the blogroll) now appears to be stronger that the page with the link in the bodytext of an article.
(opposite of what was initially thought to be strongest)

Not really an accurate enough test, would need to replicate it 5 or 6 times first.