25 replies to this topic

[perkle]

Thanks for the reply.
Can anyone suggest where I might look to correct "different bigger problems"

[Jill]

Duplicate content issues, lack of quality backward links, lack of a service/product that is unique/original...for starters.

[perkle]

Duplicate content issues, lack of quality backward links, lack of a service/product that is unique/original...for starters.

Thanks Jill for the information.
I don't have duplicate content I know and I do have a product and service to provide so it must be the backward link issue. I have thought this might be the problem so I will take your advice and hire the advertised directory link firm in your most resent news letter to get me listed in some good directories. With your honest reputation in the SEO field I know you wouldn't let them advertise in your news letter if they were not legit and reliable.

Thanks so very much for all your help in the forum.

Perkle

[Randy]

Now don't be silly enough to rely on advertisers anywhere without reading the info Jill provides. eg

Paid sponsor ads are clearly marked as advertisements and neither the
High Rankings® Advisor nor Jill Whalen take any responsibility for the
claims made within these ads, nor the Web sites they point to. Paid ads
do not constitute an endorsement for the products, services or companies
advertising in the newsletter. Please visit our sponsors and use your
own due diligence for any purchases you make on the Internet. Feel free
to forward this email in its entirety to anyone you feel might be
interested in it.

There's a thread on this very subject here.

[Jill]

I will take your advice and hire the advertised directory link firm in your most resent news letter to get me listed in some good directories

Great! Let us know how it goes.

[perkle]

Thanks Randy, I didn't mean to scare you and I did go read the thread you posted. I guess thats why I posted my earlier post. You see at age 60 I know how to test a few things too. I read this forum almost daily trying to learn how to make my site better and make a living.

Still this recent post confuses me even more in "reciprocal link building."

"It is spam if you're linking to sites you really aren't recommending to your visitors. Never, ever add a link to a site that you haven't checked out and decided your visitors might like."

Now, does getting my site listed in good directories help or hurt it.
Please in your best advice just answere the question, 1,000 are wanting to know, it might save them untold hours of hard work.

[Jill]

Now, does getting my site listed in good directories help or hurt it.

It doesn't hurt. They're linking to you. It may or may not help.

[perkle]

Should I trust a site that dose not offer a email form or name so I can contact them for information rather than purchase.

Your Quote from link building:
"Sorry, but anyone who would show their visitors a site that they don't truly recommend is a fool. Plain and simple.

If you have no respect for your site visitors, why should they bother with your site?"


Quote From your news letter:
Paid ads do not constitute an endorsement for the products, services or companies
advertising in the newsletter.

You advise people not to link to bad sites or untrusted sites yet you have not endorsed your links nor I suppose you will ever.

So Hey everybody rush out and buy everything you find in this news letter or Forum it must be the right thing to do cause you found it here.

I think if your going to set yourself up as an expert you owe a great DUTY to your listeners to give straight answers and practice that advise.

I remember in 1968 my senior drill instructor in the Marines on our final day of test we had to run many miles with full pack and all that gear and he didn't trade off laps like other instructors, He ran the same course. Needless to say he won our respect and as a result we would have fought through hell with him.

I am finished now, I have to go find someone who will tell it straight.

[Randy]

I think you're confusing three completely different and separate things perkle.

First there are sites you link to.

Second there are sites that link to you.

Third there are purchased advertisements.

For the first one, sites linking to you: You basically cannot be hurt by sites that link to you. If this could actively hurt you it would be a piece of cake for anyone to mess with their competitors simply by submitting their site to known link farms. So if a site is linking to you, and that's it, there should be no harm in it. Those are out of your control. About the worst that can happen is the sites linking to you don't provide you quite as much value as you might hope.

For the second one, sites you link to: These can hurt you sometimes, because who you link to is 100% within your control. So if you make bad decisions in who you link to it can cause problems both with the search engines (eg becoming part of a bad neighborhood) and most certainly with real users if you lose their trust. For those who look at this kind of thing, they can usually ascertain within 5-10 minutes what type of webmaster you are and whether they should place their trust in you or not.

These two sometimes get combined when talking about reciprocal links. However they're really still two different things, and should be treated as such.

The third one is a whole other ballgame, though it's not always easy to delineate between real links and paid advertisements. Are there usually some editorial guidelines established by whoever is selling the advertising? Yes. Are these guidelines uniform across the spectrum? Not a chance. Some in fact do not make it clear what is a Recommendation (normal link) and a paid Ad. Jill does this as well as it can be done IMO. They're clearly marked as advertisements and Jill tells people to treat them as they should.

To expect or demand that anybody who accepts advertising to have personally tested each and every product/service they accept as an advertiser is simply unrealistic. Not only would they not always have the need for the advertisers product or service, but you can also bet if it did happen Jill's experience would not be the same as anyone else. People want to advertise in her newsletter because it has a wide reach and a loyal audience. So any advertiser would make sure Jill got the best customer experience anyone could ever hope for. The same may not always be true for every other user.

Do I know Jill's editorial controls she exercises when deciding whether to accept an advertiser or not? No, I don't. Don't wanna know either since it's none of my business. However I think you can safely assume she has some, and I think you can also safely assume that they're likely at a much higher standard than the vast majority of newsletters out there on the subject of SEO/Web Marketing.

[Jill]

You advise people not to link to bad sites or untrusted sites yet you have not endorsed your links nor I suppose you will ever.

That's right, with the qualifier that they are paid ads not endorsements.

I didn't realize that you were talking about saying something similar for the links you might want to put on your site. Certainly if you had a links page and said something similar to what I say in my disclaimer, then there would be nothing wrong with that, in my opinion.

The difference is in the disclaimer. Without one of those, there's an assumption that a link is an endorsement. That's what we talk about when we say anyone would be a fool to link to something they don't recommend. No disclaimer with a link, certainly smacks of an endorsement.

So Hey everybody rush out and buy everything you find in this news letter or Forum it must be the right thing to do cause you found it here.

Did you read my disclaimer? I said to do exactly the opposite. USE YOUR DUE DILIGENCE. That's exactly what my disclaimer says.

When I endorse a product that I have personally used, you will also see that in my newsletter because I say so. I will say "Karon Thackston's new Writing PPC Ads book is awesome and worth the money" because I know that to be true. I will say "KeywordDiscovery is a great program for finding the keyword phrases to optimize your pages for" because I use it and it works. And those endorsements in my newsletter are clearly endorsements.

Randy spelled it out pretty clearly above. There are different ways of linking to things, and certainly if you want to gain the trust of your visitors, you need to spell out whether you're providing an endorsement or just a paid ad.

The irony in all this is High Rankings has so little advertising compared to nearly every other informational site online. It's hilarious to me how my 1 paid for ad that I do perhaps once a quarter gets so much crap!

Prolly should move these posts out of this thread...

[perkle]

Go ahead I've had my say