Day 2
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Slightly hung-over from the night before but still eager to pay attention to the days seminars. Unfortunately I missed the first session (a good night was had by all)
My first seminar was the “link building clinic”. On the panel for this seminar was Ammon Johns (Propellernet UK) Warren Cowen (Greenlight) and Dixon Jones (Receptional).

The reason I went to this clinic, which was essentially just a question and answer session from the start, was that as mentioned earlier, off page criteria is more important than on page so any seminars on link building are definitely worth going to. Another reason was that I wanted to hear Ammon Johns as I had a lot of respect for his posts and contributions on cre8asiteforums.com as well as his various published articles. I was keen to see if his speaking was as professional and knowledgeable as his forum posts implied. I wasn’t disappointed. Ammon knows his stuff and is as good a speaker as his posts & articles suggested he would be.

I decided to ask a question on interlinking of sister sites (multiple domains) that are hosted on the same IP ‘c’ block. Whether or not such links counted and not so much penalized, but were given as much weight as links from other sites.

Not really a basic link building question and one which did have some visitors literally asking what a c block is. However, this is an area where there is a lot of mixed opinion even amongst SEM professionals and I was keen to see what Ammon and the panel had to say about it. The answer was pretty much what I myself considered to be the case which was that interlinking multiple domains on the same domain in itself is not a sin. Having JUST links from the same ip c block might well be. It looks (and often is) artificial in the eyes of search engines and can easily be spotted. If there are no other links from any other domains, particularly authority sites of the same theme then it wouldn’t be difficult for Google and Co. to not count ‘incestual’ linking. However, if there is a good mixture of links from other domains then this may well not trigger a filter or remove a site from a filter. In other words. The doorway domain spammers out there are wasting their domain registration fees money if they don’t work on links from other related sites and rely solely on their own sister sites. This makes sense from a search engines point of view and I believe is being implemented now and is not just theory.

Another good tip from Ammon was that of gaining citations/testimonials links. You know the ones
“I have used xyz product and have found a significant increase in business..” <link>Company name and website</link>

A good example for my own field might be…
http://www.wordtracker.com/testimonials.html

A PageRank 6 link from a thematic website. They don’t get much better!

Alan
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What is a website without traffic?
ABAKUS Internet Marketing