Getting Linkjuice can be dangerous to your online health

Want to know how well your site stacks up to others in your industry regarding links pointing to you across multiple domains? You should, it raises your Google PR if you have numerous sites pointing to you (linkage). The hard part however is getting (good) sites to point to you or your interesting topic without doing it in a shady way and risking the big Google penalty. Google frowns upon paid links or blackhat tactics to get links.

First off, before I go off topic as I often do, this tool to check linkage can be found at SEOMOZ. See. I just gave him linkjuice, well once my site has a decent ranking, but you get the idea. People want others linking to their site because it’s free advertising and helps build up the page rank.

I was reading a story today where a SEO expert had created a widget, a simple widget that other bloggers could place on their website. Normally by bloggers placing this widget on their site, it helps to build link popularity to the person who created the widget. Simple enough.

Problem was, deep inside the widget’s html code was anchor text pointing to an off topic subject and site that had nothing to do with the widget itself. That off topic site instantly had thousands of blogs pointing to it without their knowledge. His link juice surely was through the roof. It was risky but apparently was working quite well until someone figured it out and outed him. I believe Google was notified and his PR was taken away. I don’t want that kind of risk and I’m sure you don’t either.

We all know that its a long tedious process building up your site and getting a good Google PR. Part of having a high Google Page Rank is links. Links organically linking to you because you’re relevant, not because you paid them or did something sneaky to get the links.

If you want your site to rank well then it’s good old fashion “safe” techniques that work best. While you can make a lot of money off of other frowned upon tactics, are you willing to take that risk? I always consider who I’m reading or following because the majority of pro bloggers have other sites where they make their money, most of them selling niche products like ring tones and online dating. They don’t talk about these sites on their SEO blogs because they know better.

When you see a site that says “How I made 100,000.00 from Google Adsense”, they didn’t do it from the site you’re reading. Most of these pro bloggers are just very good at what they do, and their SEO blogs give them a platform to talk about how good they are and get people like us reading their sites religiously, hoping to uncover golden treasures in SEO. They get lots of sites pointing to them and over time they build very good Google PR. You can get sites pointing to you too if you deliver good rich content or have useful tools like SEOMOZ.

The tool above will give you a decent snapshot of how well you rate but if you want the full report, you’ll have to join @ 79.00 a month to use it and other tools. Clearly he has great SEO tools but in this economy, us little guys cant afford 79.00 a month. If you can, it’s a worthy investment.

The site also offers some free tools that can help you tweak your site like SEO toolbox, search term tools, popular search tool and lots of good advice.

Next week I’m going to post a page with all my favorite top SEO experts that I read religiously. These are the ones I like best because they tell us more than “How I made 100,000.00 on Google Adsense”, click here to buy my stuff and those are sites that deserve links, naturally. These are exactly the kind of sites Google likes to reward.

Good content=good links!

 Image credit has a great post on SEO tips

Tags: advertising, anchor text, blackhat, blogs, building links naturally, dirty seo tactics, experts, getting banned for link trading, google, google ban, link juice, link popularity, linkage, niche, page rank, seo, widget, widgets