ConnectContent.com

Dumb question - are you looking for backlinks?

I'm posting an article below written by RT Cunningham of Untwisted Vortex. I have known RT for a while now and he has created a site which will enable users to obtain "relevant" one-way backlinks from within the community. I'm not a sales man so I'll tell you up front that it will cost you $12 a month to join. This isn't a pitch to make money though and $12 is cheap anyway - this is a pitch to see if anyone is interested. I'll let him explain the system below but I want to mention that this wont work unless we get enough people interested. One hundred would be good - a thousand even better. Is it Black Hat? Let's call it grey.

RT offered me $6 a signup (you get the same deal as an affiliate) but I have removed my affiliate link from the article - I don't want you to think I'm doing this for the money - I'm doing this because I myself would like to find another "network" for building links. This could be the best yet but not unless we get enough people to join who understand the value of "relevant keyword anchored" backlinks. I would have made the system free to use but RT is wary of the amount of spammers it would attract and settled on a small fee. Most link networks run $150 per month.

Btw - I say we but I am not involved as a business partner or agent of any kind - just a user and it's in my interest to convince as many of you to join up as I can. I want this to work.

Many of you know RT so I don't need to hype him - he's a good guy testing out an idea that should work. Nothing is certian as we all know things like this depend on the active participation of others. We all know how that usually turns out.

Is this Google safe? Nope - nothing is but this is about as hard to track down as anything I have seen. Hard because the links will all be from relevant sites - using relevant anchored keywords - and contained in a real post. These - in case I haven't mentioned it more than 100 times - are the best links that you can get. Bar none. They are also the absolute hardest for competitors and Google to spot let alone penalize. Remember that 100 or so links like these are what puts my new money making blog so high in the rankings, in a competitive niche, in less than 5 months. These kind of links are gold and as you all know are a real pain to get. The difficulty in getting them is also why Google weights them so heavily. Conversely do-follow comments are easy to get and not endorsed by the site owner and hence have little juice - if any these days.

Well that's about as sales pitchy as I can get. If you have niche sites built then you need links. I hope we can all work together and help each other out.

I'll hand this over to RT now...

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R.T. Cunningham - ConnectContent.com


As Griz has mentioned many times on both of his make money online blogs, there are multiple ways to build backlinks. I don't want to spend any time rehashing what works because I want to emphasize a different and possibly better approach to building backlinks. Before I do that, however, I want to quickly mention what doesn't work very well.

Comment Chasing

A whole lot of people spend a whole lot of time commenting on "do follow" blogs in their efforts to build backlinks. There are several problems with this tactic. If the blog owner doesn't delete your keyword anchored in the name field, chances are that your keyword still won't be related to the topic at hand. While experts may tell you that any backlink is better than no backlink, backlinks that have little relevance don't do much -- they don't carry any link authority.

Reciprocal Link Exchanges

Besides carrying far less weight than one-way links, reciprocal link exchanges between relevant blogs takes up a lot of time. In my opinion, that time is far better spent on working out one-way link exchanges. One-way link exchanges are actually the same thing as reciprocal links, but without being directly linked. Party A links to one of party B's posts and party B links to one of party A's posts but from a different post.

The hardest part about link exchanges of any kind is getting the links with the right, targeted anchor terms. Anchor terms that point to blog post titles, blog titles, blog author names, etc. are just about worthless most of the time.

The White Hat Google Game

If you read what Google has to say about link exchanges, you have to write content that naturally compels readers to link to the source to be completely safe. It's a nice thought, but it doesn't work in the real world unless you're a socially popular blogger.

That kind of thing defeats the purpose of targeting search visitors in the first place and doesn't make any money for you or for Google. In my personal opinion, it's a smokescreen for what they really want you to do and I'll leave it at that.

What Always Works

Linking from within a post to another post on another blog with targeted, relevant anchor terms will always carry the greatest amount of link authority. You can get very few links of this kind and literally watch an optimized post rise to page 1 of the Google SERPS if it doesn't have too much competition. If you get a lot of links of this kind, you'll destroy the competition.

This is where ConnectContent comes into the picture. It's all about embedding relevant anchor terms into older posts or creating new posts around relevant anchor terms. The procedure is so simple, it's almost ridiculous. You list your desired anchor terms and where you want them to point to and other people grab that information and put it to work. The site takes care of the tracking part of it.

It isn't free ($12.00/month or $120.00/year) even though I think it should be. The problem with providing a powerful tool like this for free is that the scammers and spammers would come out of the woodwork to take advantage of it while everyone else would get left behind. Not only that, but I think the generous 50% commission could really be another asset for anyone able to drive the affiliate sales.

Would you get penalized by Google?

Since I announced the public launch of ConnectContent, the most frequently asked question has been "Does it leave a footprint that Google can detect?" The short answer is "No, not if you do it the way you're supposed to do it."

Ever since people were slapped by Google for doing sponsored posts (paid links), something I call "Google Paranoia" has set in. Everyone seems to be worried about getting penalized by Google for one thing or another. I think the biggest problem is that people refuse to read, or they don't understand, the Google webmaster guidelines concerning - Webmaster Help Center" link schemes.

Google talks about excessive link exchanges, both reciprocal and otherwise. In other places, Google talks about relevance. The Google search engine algorithms are all designed around relevance because that's where they make their money -- by showing AdSense targeted to specific content. Their automated spam detection techniques are also based around relevance. Their algorithms, other than checking for duplicate content, are very good.

ConnectContent is a link exchange in the loosest meaning of the phrase, and not much more than the web as a whole. The entire purpose of the network is to list what you want as anchor terms as opposed to people guessing what you want. There is no guarantee that your requested terms will ever get linked to and that's what sets it apart from other networks and it's why I think it wouldn't matter to Google even if they knew what links were being generated and where.

Despite my beliefs, I don't want to make it easy for anyone (not necessarily Google) to see what's going on. No real names are ever used and nothing is publicly displayed outside of the network. I'm more concerned with malicious individuals (your competitors) than I am with Google. The gist of all this is that producing logical and relevant backlinks should never incur the wrath of Google.

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Thanks RT.

Nothing more to add other than I hope you will give this a shot. Follow the link if interested and thanks for reading. ConnectContent


Cheers,