• An increased traffic to your site
• Higher visibility on various search engines.
• Savings on a lot of promotional expenses.

Another way to move up the ladder on the rank list of the search engines is to buy backlinks. However this method includes a lot of expenditure as one need to buy a lot of backlinks, which, besides also need to be relevant. If you have the money, then it’s no problem. Buy backlinks is an investment as it sooner or later helps you bag in good amount of lead generation.

In the process of link building we can also employ the help of link building service firms. These link building service firms may come out with packages which are ideal for the websites that are newer and desire to be indexed and ranked high in various commonly used search engines.

Thus buying backlinks and taking help from professional link building service firms help in link building and increasing the link popularity. Link popularity here, meaning the link numbers that point to your website from various other sites. Also one might add that it is not the quantity but quality of the links that is important and matters at the end.

I checked with several industry insiders and the rumors I’m hearing are that this service will be very accurate and fundamentally different from alexa (which ranks your site in a relative scale compared to other sites). I’m even hearing that Google plans to get the data from actual web servers (raw numbers!).

T35 is currently ranking top 5,000 on Alexa:

I wonder how well we would do when Google ranks us? One thing is for sure, this service will definitely give more ammo to the internet marketers of the ‘net.

June 30th Update: The service is officially in beta, and I have been playing around with it all evening. It looks really cool and will probably put a lot of companies out of business.

Here are some screenshots:

It still seems a little buggy, for example T35 Hosting shows up in the “Body Builder” category, and the stats don’t seem close to the actual numbers. Still, once the bugs are fixed and they are out of beta, I think this will become the premier internet marketing tool.

Apparently, Google might consider this somewhat of a ‘google bomb’ where someone tries to manipulate the ranking of a site with millions of links with the same keyword. So for our latest SEO tweak/test I decided we are going to try to vary these a little bit.

The game plan is to dynamically rotate the 6,000,000 back links we have from member pages so they contain different anchor text each time the page loads. So in effect, we went from 100% weight on “free web hosting” to 15% “Free PHP Hosting”, 25% “Free Website”, 25% “Free Web Hosting”, 10% “Free Hosting”, 10% “T35 Hosting”. It’s difficult to tell if this will boost our overall ranking or just hurt “free web hosting” while improving the others. At the same time, I’m somewhat scared to lose our top 10 “free web hosting” listing on yahoo. This should be very interesting, and I’ll keep you guys updated as soon as I see any ranking changes.

On a similar (SEO) note, our brand new directory site seems to have dropped off from google a few weeks ago. The only major tweak we made recently was going from domain.com/category/ to domain.com/category.html. I asked on several forums but couldn’t get a definitive answer as to which is better for SEO. I’m going to try changing it back and see if it helps. I’ll keep you guys posted!

In an experiment to try to validate the importance of link exchanges, I am going to try to get several other established sites (PR3 and above) to link us with the keyword ‘web hosting blog’. Although I’ll check back in with the results, everyone should be able to monitor the progress of this test by simply seeing how well we are moving up in the rankings for ‘web hosting blog’.

My gut feeling is that although most people have disreguarded link exchanges in recent months (since google started penalizing for the practice), it is still perhaps the best way to get better rankings from the search engines.

Most importantly, I was trying to find out if putting your keyword first (instead of your site title) would make a difference. For example: Is “T35 Hosting – Free Web Hosting” worse than “Free Web Hosting – T35 Hosting”.

Although no experiment with search engines is ever perfect, I tried to put in some controls and changed nothing except the title for an entire 2 weeks. In addition I used two search engines (Google and Yahoo) for this experiment.

Yahoo with old title:

Rank #11

Yahoo with new title:

Rank #10

Google with old title:

Rank #90

Google with new title:

Rank #86

Surprisingly, the new title increased the search engine rankings (although only by a little) on both Google and Yahoo! Although I still think it’s better to have your site name first (for usability), the search engines apparently prefer your keyword first. In addition, click through rate on my listings also went up! There you have it folks — titles do make a difference. Although I don’t think a title will make or break your rankings, it’s a contributing factor (albeit a small one) on both Google and Yahoo.

For example, if you were to start a new website, you would have a starting page rank (PR of 0). To reaise your PR you would have to get sites with a higher PR to link back to you. This would in effect put sites with high PR in a good amount of power. They could now sell links on their site, and the higher PR, the more money they could get for the links.

Google has obviously never been a fan of this. They want sites to link to you because you have quality content, not because you paid them off. In effect, you would be cheating the google algorithm and make google think you are a good site that deserves to be higher in rankings (while in reality, you just paid off some high PR sites).

After several months of speculation, Google has finally rolled out their “paid link penalization” page rank update. Although this in itself wasn’t surprising, the kind of sites that got hit is shocking. Forbes, New York Times, and many other notable web properties were hit the hardest. In fact, Forbes.com now has a measly page rank of 4, while our three new websites that were started just a month ago now rate at PR5!

On that note, although I don’t claim to be an SEO expert, I have been experimenting with some SEO for our new websites. Surprisingly, I must have figured out the correct formula because all 3 of our new sites were ranked at PR5 – something that is unheard of for a brand new website! Unfortunately, those rankings came at a cost of lowering T35.com from PR6 down to PR5. I am hoping that once the next PR update rolls around, the new sites will be considered *established* and will boost T35 to PR6-7 instead of dragging it down to 6.

 With Google now officially frowning on paid links, and even link exchanges, I wonder how this will impact the web development landscape? At the same time, more and more people are becoming frustrated with the vagueness of the Google page rank. It might be a good opportunity for another company to come out with their own site ranking tool. Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com are all good candidates.

I would love to hear some feedback from all of you guys. How was your site affected by the new page rank update? Do you plan to change the way you conduct business (link exchanges, etc..)?