Don't Stuff Your Blogs with Links - Confessions of an Ex-Spammer
I used to be a spammer. It's true! I did it here on ActiveRain. I did it on my Wordpress blogs. I did it on Craigslist. I was spammy wherever I could and with whatever website would let me. And you know what? It worked! It actually worked for a long, long time. You can even go back through my old AR blogs and see where I did it. I never deleted the old blogs.
But something happened in 2011 and 2012. Google released a bunch of algorithms like Panda, Penguin, etc.. I don't really understand these algorithms. They are written, used and incorporated by people a lot smarter than me. But I am smart enough to know what works and what doesn't work.
What's Wrong with Link Stuffing?
Once Google started these new algorithms my black-hat, spammy ways stopped working as well and I went on a slow, steady decline of effectiveness. No, my blogs didn't fall off a cliff and I didn't go broke, but I was a small-time, spammy blogger. My black-hat techniques weren't that sophisticated. In the world of spammers, I was probably considered a misdemeanor-type of offender by Google. I'm sure there were spammy bloggers out there that lost all their top Google rankings and their business along with it!
Since then I've changed my ways. I've learned my lessons and I've adjusted to the righteous way of blogging. One of those lessons I learned was not to stuff links in a blog!
A link, if it is a Do Follow link, will tell Google to give some lovin' to whatever web-page the link points to. But here's the lesson:
Do Follow links must share the web-page lovin' with other Do Follow links from the same page.
For example, if a web-page has a Google rank of 5, and there are 5 Do Follow links pointing to 5 different web-pages, each of those pages gets Google rank lovin' of 1. If there are 10 Do Follow links, each link will carry Google rank lovin' of 1/2 of a point. I know that my analogy is not very technical and is clumsy at best, but its true.
So when you're writing a blog for say a community you're targeting, like I did with our Oak Valley Greens page try to not put too many links in the blog pointing to what you want. I have two in the example above. These two links must share the whatever amount of Google lovin' with each other.
Yes, I've paid my penance and I've changed my ways. By the way, white-hat blogging takes more time and effort, but it produces so much more than black-hat blogging ever did!
I hope this helps you out in your AR and other blogging. Have fun with your blogs and remember, Original Content is King!
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