SEO Q&A with Joseph Archibald!

1. What are your thoughts about getting a lot of links from the same source (ex. Article Directory), is this good for ranking or useless because they come from the same source?


It is my current belief (Google changes its algorithms regularly so one has to be very open to this and expect this particular philosophy to change) that many links from the same IP address are not going to enhance your ranking performance as much as it would be improved if you had backlinks from differing IP's.(In Yahoo! and Bing, I would expect this not to be the case so much - I think you could rank well with more backlinks from the same IP. But my knowledge base is more in line with Google). If for example you were to send out 10 different articles with the same anchor text in the bio box to ezinearticles.com then I believe that you will only get full credit from one of those articles. The others still do count, but I sense that you would gain most value from the single article's backlinks. Nevertheless, a link is a link so there is still something to be said for amassing links from the same IP if its very easy to do so. Could indeed be valueable use of time and that is a big player in the world of SEO - time being well spent.


On the other hand however, there is good reason for still using this approach from the point of view that more people will see your writing - your articles, if indeed you are using article marketing. More people will scrape your article and use it on their own sites, thus obtaining further backlinks this way. And of course, if your bio box is enticing and you are gathering unique views to your articles, you will gain traffic this way. Thus it makes real sense to write more than a single article and post them to the same directory.



2. Do you believe getting high PR do-follow links will boost your search engine rankings faster than just getting lots of low PR backlinks?


Yes I do believe this. However, I also believe that there is something to be said for the "watering down" effect. This is where there are lots of backlinks coming out of a page of content and not much high Google PR links going into that page. Thus there are many pages "feeding" off that one page, while that page is not regaining sustenance. Much in the way that a dog who has a number of young puppies and has to keep them fed. If she - the mother - were not to continually be nourished, she would soon enough perish.

To begin figuring all this out when assessing for a backlinking campaign however, just causes too many problems. Today the page may only feed out to 5 other low Google PR pages. Next week it may feed out to 25. There's too much action on the internet to be too picky as to who or what you are trying to obtain links from and who or what not to. Time well spent here is time invested in obtaining a backlink from a quality web page, regardless of the current Google PR value.



3. How important is it to write relevant content around your anchor text links, do you think it gives the link more power?


Relevant content or latent semantic indexing as Google calls it, is very important now. Not long ago that was not the case, but more and more now Google will assess this to be of value. Thus blogrolls in blogs used to be an important aspect of linking to and from other blogs but now their value is very limited.

As such, writing quality content which is very much related to your main anchor text keyword phrases and embedding the anchor links within that text body is thoroughly important for good on page SEO.



4. I have read that putting your keywords at the beginning of your URL, Title, and Headlines will help your site rank better than having the keywords at the end. What are your thoughts on this?


I do believe there is something in this yes, but its not something I get hung up on too much. If for example in an article title I want to pull in views from those who are interested in the topic I was writing about, then I may write something like this... "How to ride a horse in 6 easy steps". Even though the main keyword phrase I was actually targeting may be "ride a horse in 6 steps". I write for my site visitors or article readers and not so much to please the search engines. I sense that if my visitors keep on coming then inevitably the search engines will follow along too.

5. Do you use any services such as SEOLinkvine, 1WayLinks, or Linkvana? If so what are your thoughts on them, have you found them useful?


I have used SEOLinkvine Matt, yes. Its a very good service and Matt and Brad Callen are going to be really building it up in the weeks and months to come. I believe if you are to get on board now then its the right time as the price is going to be a lot higher soon enough. You get locked in at the lower monthly price.

1WayLinks I have not used as yet no. So all I can say about that is due to it being a Jon Ledger product I would expect it to be very good too. I have real admiration for Jon's work within the internet marketing community.

LinkVana - yes, I have used that service which belongs to Dave Kelly, the highly renowned SEO'er and business man. The problem with LinkVana or LV, is that the price tag being what it is - $147 a month, its not something that the vast majority of us mere mortals can keep up paying for long without seeing some relatively early results. I have used LV on two different occasions now. The first time I kept up with it for about 3 months and saw little change in my rankings. I dumped the service as soon as the 3 months were spent! The second time was much more recent when I only invested for a month. Not long enough to see results you may think, and, no, I did not see any positive benefits to my sites rankings. But some services you do see much faster results with and those are far cheaper, albeit perhaps more limited in scope.

Which would you prefer however Matt, a service that was costing you $147 a month and you had to wait 5 months to see any change in your web page rankings, or a service that cost you say $67 a month and within a couple of weeks you could see some improvement in rankings?

I rest my case there.

If you enjoyed this Q&A please check out Joseph Archibald's blog @ SEO tips!