[/tab]For all the aspiring web-designer and webmasters out there - this deals with one of the most commonly overlooked fact about increasing your page rank. Most of us after putting up a new site, are satisfied with simple submitting our site to multiple search engines using some of the free submission engines. After that it's a long long wait till the crawlers come over to our page and starts indexing them. Even then it doesn't work out that well. And we always keep wondering WHY our sites don't show up on higher ranks on search engines.
[tab]One of the prime determinant factors for a good page rank is the number of inbound links - i.e. HOW MANY SITES are LINKING to YOU. If the spiders find a whole bunch of sites linking back to you, your page rank shoots up immediately. Now for most part, link exchanges deal with ugly, messy banners and even more ugly looking pages filled with an endless jumble of worthless links. So I went out and searched far and wide, till I found a couple of free services that are small (but growing) and have a nice clean interface. My criteria was that their link-ex page should be simple and clean - if not professionaly layed out. Here I present you with a list of few of them and the results I got within 2 days of putting up my site with them. For now I'm writing about only one site - I'll come back and keep filling up more and more.
1. GotLinks? - http://www.gotlinks.com
[/tab]From the looks of it, this is a pretty recent site with a very low member count (as I'm writing this). Their stats say: 653 Members 426,409 Links Exchanged - which doesn't say much, but you shouldn't simply look at these figures. The quality of the sites linking back to you matter a WHOLE LOT too. So I decided to experiment with this site and see what results it gets me. The interface is very clean and compact and that's what I like about them. Their site loads very fast and has just the right information you need to know - nothing gaudy or excess.
[tab]The Setup process was quite simple. First you register for an account with them (of course) - and then you get the ability of adding ONE or MULTIPLE sites to your account there.
The next step is really important - you are presented with a whole directory of Links, nicely categorized. You can go through each of them and see which all sites you like/don't like - and which all broad categories you want. Then, you can filter out all the sites/categories you DONT want to be linking to you and hand-pick the nicer ones. These are called your Link Partners.
[/tab]The third step involves generating a linking code, that's done by their servers - you simply take this code and create a PHP file out of it. Keep in mind, this links generator code DOESN'T need to be placed ANYWHERE on your main page. BUT, this PHP file DOES NEED to have a link to it from your index.php/html of your site.
But remember, you cannot fool them - once you have created your links page, you have to validate your site through their servers, i.e. their crawler will probably come to your page and see whether you've put up the links partner page on your site. Only after validation, your link gets put up on your partner sites.
If you want to see an example, goto my site: http://www.antilost.com and CLICK on the LINKS menu-item right on TOP of the page. That'll show you a demo links page - the one I received by signing up with GotLinks.
Now I present you with a sample:
[tab] The number of categories/pages that are presented to you on GotLinks, when you signup initially is around 58 - with a total of over 46,000 links.
The links page that shows up on my site, after I handpicked the categories looks like:
http://www.antilost.com/linkex.php - notice how much I've cut down on, and picked up sites that are MORE related to my site's content/nature.
See these two and notice how easily/nicely you can refine the list of your link partners.
Results
Similar to what I said in the introductory part of this article, when I'd first started my site, I'd just submitted it to several search engines and sat back, hoping it would show up. Just two days back, vujsa suggested I do some links exchange and I went out and found this site. After creating my account and linking with the link partners, my number of inbound links shot up from ZERO to THREE HUNDRED and SIXTY in just TWO days - and 50 more to go in about a days time. Now AntiLost immediately shows up on Google on a simple Search - - though still not on the first page, but right near the middle of the second page. Earlier this wasn't even listed on the 10th page. That definitely says a LOT.
Here's what GotLinks? says about themselves:
QUOTE
Since launching on March 10, 2005, Gotlinks?com has achieved the following positions on Google using no marketing techniques other than our own software.
"Exchange Links Now" - Rank #1
"Increase Your Google PageRank" - Rank #1
"Trade Links Now" - Rank #1
"Increase Google PageRank" - Rank #3
"Free Link Directory" - Rank #6
Source: http://www.gotlinks.com/
"Exchange Links Now" - Rank #1
"Increase Your Google PageRank" - Rank #1
"Trade Links Now" - Rank #1
"Increase Google PageRank" - Rank #3
"Free Link Directory" - Rank #6
Source: http://www.gotlinks.com/
Most of your should give it a try and see the results for yourself - it comes out in a day or two at the most. If dissatisfied, simply discontinue the service and hop over to another one. Over the next few days I'll bring you more such news about the nicer link-exchange sites, which you can utilize without the fear of having a whole bunch of ugly-stupid sites linking to you...
Regards,
m^e
