Year after year, decade after decade, early 21st Century after late 20th Century, the LinksManager Helpdesk receives questions about “footprints,” bits and bytes of embedded code that enable web pages to do certain things essential to their functionality.

Footprint itself, in this context, is pretty much an informal term.  There is no precise definition of a code “footprint” as there is, for example, for a page “footprint,” which is the size of the files comprising the page and an indication of how long it will take the page to open in a browser at any given download speed.

Most commonly, however, code fragments that receive the footprint designation invoke an automated action involving data collection or transmission.  When you click the “submit” button on most online forms, for example, the code or script that organizes what you inputted into the form and transmits it to the form manager is often referred to as a footprint because it — in a certain sense — creates a trail between your computer and the form’s host.

Likewise, code that automatically “harvests” information about an end user or an end user’s computer is also frequently identified as a footprint.  Does that make such footprints evil?

No.  Absolutely not.

If you answered “yes” it was probably because we deliberately baited you by using the word “harvests,” which has a negative connotation because programs designed to invade people’s computers to unethically (and frequently illegally) collect personal information have long been referred to as “harvesting” applications.

Yet the great majority of computer “harvests” are performed for perfectly legitimate reasons.

You may not, to cite one example, be best pleased by Microsoft XP’s harvesting information about your latest CPU or motherboard upgrade and demanding that you revalidate your OS, but there is nothing illegal, immoral or fattening about MS doing it.  It is simply annoying, stupid, deliberately infuriating and a classic example of the arrogance displayed by the rulers of all declining empires throughout recorded history.

Likewise, most tracking cookies — like those which enable automatic logons to subscription and other secure sites — are not attempts to steal your soul, their actual purpose is to make your life easier or, in other cases, collect generic, non-identifiable usage data designed to help businesses refine their sales programs and application developers improve their programs.

As long as end users are given the opportunity to opt out of storing their passwords or contributing their data, there is nothing wrong with any of these automated routines or, if you prefer, footprints.

So, why is this somewhat esoteric subject a chronic source of LinksManager Helpdesk inquiries?

Because footprints are yet another of the seemingly endless series of straw men that search engine optimization (SEO) flim-flam artists set up and knock down in an attempt to prove they are — in the absence of improved return positions, which is the only SEO analytic that matters — providing something of value to their customers.

The patter goes like this:

1. Footprints enable automation.

2. Google considers automated web routines bad and invokes an “ignore” command that prevents Googlebot from indexing pages that contain them.

3. LinksManager-generated links page contain footprints and won’t, therefore, be indexed.

To set the record straight, let’s work backward from number three.

Like tens of millions of other sites, LinksManager uses a “post” footprint to allow users’ forms to communicate with our servers.  Next to static “mailto” and “get”, which are one-way methods for retrieving information, “post”, which allows for dynamic updating and storage of data, is the web’s most common method for implementing forms.

“Post’s” purposes and specifications are clearly detailed in past and current HTML standards and do not in any way or form violate Google or any other search engine’s guidelines or recommendations.

LinksManager can also add an optional tracking footprint to your link pages to count the number of hits each of your links receives and rank them in popularity.  This footprint is also completely search-engine neutral, but if you’re worried about it you can disable it completely via a drop-down menu in the Top Link Lists section of your LinksManager Control Panel.

The truth is that Google not only indexes most LinksManager links pages, it even assigns PageRank to many of them.  If your links pages are not yet indexed by Google, it doesnt mean they are not being factored into your rankings. 

Consider http://atcmonitor.com/atcresources which has a PR of 3 and happens to be the links page on one of our parent company’s sites, ATCMonitor.com, which offers live monitoring of the skies above Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the world’s busiest passenger air terminal.

To truly appreciate how significant a Google of Page Rank of three for a “mere” links page actually is and how it totally debunks the claim that LinksManager-created pages won’t be indexed, let alone ranked, we need a standard of measurement.  Since ATCmonitor.com gives live radar and audio from the Atlanta Hartsfield control tower let’s Google “Atlanta Control Tower.”

Hhhhmmm, the ATCMonitor home page returns #1 and has a PageRank of 4.  Of the nine other returns on the first page, only two — count ‘em, two — equal the PR of 3 earned by ATCMonitor’s LinksManager-empowered links page, footprints and all.  The other seven top returns all have PRs of zero to two.

So much for the BS about LinksManager links pages not being indexed.  As it does with every other web page, Google bases its indexing and ranking decisions on content, not on the software used to create the page.

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Inspector Gregory:
“Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.
“The Adventure of Silver Blaze” by Arthur Conan Doyle

Our last post discussed several Microsoft Live documents stressing the importance and beneficial nature of white-hat linking in earning positive search engine rankings.  In that post, we noted we would next comment on the November release of version 1.1 of Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.  Here goes.

In the proverbial nutshell, this is what the biggest dog in the search engine universe had to say about reciprocal linking in its first official document on search engine optimzation (SEO) practices:  Essentially nothing.

Perhaps “curiously” to those who have read the RLLs (Reciprocal Linking Lies) peddled by the kind of over-priced, under-performing, self-anointed search-engine optimization “consultants” which Google elsewhere says have ” have given the industry a black eye,” GoogleDog didn’t bark at linking.  It didn’t growl. I t didn’t snap.  It didn’t threaten to consign ethical linkers to the seventh ring of hell.

On the contrary, what the Google SEO Guide does say about linking pretty much parallels many of the things LinksManager, in this blog, on our website and in the Linking School, has been saying for years.

Things like increasing the number of your links “gradually,” avoiding “purchasing links from another site with the aim of getting PageRank instead of traffic,” and refraining from “spamming link requests out” wholesale.

Far from criticizing linking, the Google SEO Guide actually gives a few tips for making your links more effective and useful to both end users and Googlebot.

For example, the Guide advises webmasters to “format links so they’re easy to spot.  Your content,” it goes on to say, “becomes less useful if users miss the links or accidently click them … avoid using CSS or text styling that makes the links look just like regular text.”

Sound complicated?  Or maybe just irritating and time consuming?  Not to fret, LinksManager’s easy-to-use, intuitive Cosmetic Controls automatically formats your links to attractively engage site visitors’ attention without being mistaken for regular text, headlines or any other site attribute.

The Google SEO Guide also offers extensive suggestions for optimizing your anchor text for both human viewers and search-engine robots.

“Avoid using excessively keyword-filled or lengthy anchor text just for search engines,” it advises, reiterated Google’s long-stated position that the best way to optimize pages for Googlebot is to design them to maximize end user benefits.

(As an example that LinksManager and Google really do share much of the same philosophy about linking, here’s a similar quote from a Linking School article published long before Google issued its SEO guide: Search engines frown on keyword stuffing whether it appears in home page copy, articles or link text.

Other anchor text “dos” and “don’ts” cited by Google include:

– Do make sure anchor text “accurately describes the content” of the link

– Don’t write “generic anchor text like ‘page’, ‘article’, or ‘click here’ ”

– Do write “short but descriptive text”

– Don’t use “text that is off-topic or has no relation to the page linked to”

– Don’t link to “sites that Google considers spammy” because “it can affect the reputation of your own site.” (How many thousands of times over the past decade have we said precisely that?)

“The better your anchor text is,” the Guide says, “the easier it is for users to navigate to and for Google to understand what the page you’re linking to is about.”

Finally or, more accurately initially since it is at the very beginning of the Guide, Google says this: Even though this guide’s title contains the words “search engine”, we’d like to say that you should base your optimization decisions first and foremost on what’s best for the visitors of your site.  They’re the main consumers of your content and are using search engines to find your work.

Another quote echoes that sentiment: By staying focused on linking for the end user, your website will increase in value, and naturally rise in the search engine rankings as a result.

The main difference between those two quotes?  The latter isn’t in the Google Guide, it’s part of the LinksManager FAQ section … where it has resided for years.

So the next time someone tries to tell you that Google and the ethical linking community in general and LinksManager in particular aren’t on the same page, tell them to crawl off into a cave somewhere and memorize Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide … right after they get done soaking their head.

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The search engines are reading our minds!  Or maybe they’ve finally started reading all our LinksManager.com blog posts and Linking School articles.

Consider these two direct quotes:

Links are what search engines such as MSN Search/Windows Live Search, Google, and Yahoo use to determine how popular your Web site is, and where to place it in their page rankings.

– Microsoft Live Small Business How To Get Links To Your Site

If you want lots of visitors to your Web site, it helps to have lots of links to your Web site.  Link exchanges — sometimes called reciprocal linking or link swaps — are a popular way to generate more links.

– Skip Chilcott, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Office Live Small Business

Since that’s what we always say, they must have copied it from us, right?  Fat chance.

Much as our egos hate to admit it, Google and Microsoft have probably just gotten tired of their true positions on linking being twisted, distorted and misrepresented by black-hat, shade-tree search-engine mechanics and have decided to do something about it.

Whatever the reason, Google, with the release of its first-ever official SEO Starter Guide and Microsoft, in both an official Live Office web page and a senior product manager’s blog, have apparently taken a long look at the type of ethical, editor-based reciprocal linking strategy on which LinksManager is based and found it a valid site-building tool.

In many instances, actually, the documents quoted above strongly support the contention that relevant two-way linking improves a site’s search engine position and is an essential element in properly marketing and branding a website.

Since the Google Guide deals with the entire spectrum of SEO practices and the Microsoft documents are specific to linking, we’ll discuss Microsoft’s pronouncements on link exchanges now and the Google Guide in our next post.

Site Visibility

No question about it , Microsoft agrees with us and just about every other internet veteran who’s watched the web grow from a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye to the most omnipresent and powerful information medium in history:  Linking is an essential element in attracting visitors to a site.

The Microsoft How To Get Links To Your Site page is totally direct and out front on this, stating that “your business may have the most finely crafted, informative, and useful Web site ever, but it won’t do you much good if no one can find it.  That’s why you need to know about links.  They’re what guide users from one Web site to another.”

“And just as important,” the Microsoft document continues, “links are what search engines such as MSN Search/Windows Live Search, Google, and Yahoo use to determine how popular your Web site is, and where to place it in their page rankings.”

Reciprocal Linking & Link Exchanges

In his blog, Microsoft Live Small Business Senior Product Manager Steve Chilcott advises that “if you want lots of visitors to your web site, it helps to have lots of links to your web site” and says that “link exchanges — sometimes called reciprocal linking or link swaps — are a popular way to generate more links.”

Chilcott adds that reciprocal linking is, as we’ve always said, “a pretty simple concept.”  Using a hypothetical veterinarian seeking and obtaining a link from an equally hypothetical pet store site as an example, he notes that the link swap “works well” because the two site operators have “complementary, noncompetitive businesses that target the same audience: pet owners.”

OK, stop right here.  Sit down and take a deep breath, wrap your fist around a cold one if you’re that kind of person.  (Maybe a magnum of Dom P or Cristal would be more appropriate.)  Most of all listen up.  Here’s something else Chilcott wrote in one of his November blogs:  Reciprocal links help drive traffic from my site to your site and vice versa.  They also HELP US BOOST OUR RANKINGS IN SEARCH ENGINES.

Thank you, Mr. Chilcott.  For more than 10 years we’ve been preaching that quality, relevant, reciprocal links added to a site in appropriate numbers at reasonable intervals may very well improve a site’s search engine appeal.

We’ve said it and said it and said it.  We’ve backed this assertion with logic and examples and quotes from various search-engine guidelines and directives.  But never has a senior manager at an industry leader like Microsoft come right out and in plain English confirmed what so many people have known — or at least suspected — for so long … link exchanging can still — right now in 2008 — “help boost rankings in search engines.”

The Dark Side

If you’ve spent any time mining the data archives in the Linking School or reading this blog, you’re probably aware that we dedicate as many words to telling you what not to do as we do to suggesting what you should do.

That’s because there are rules and, as the Microsoft “How To Get Links” page clearly says, ignoring them can cause search engines to “ban your website.”

Fortunately, LinksManager is 100% percent compliant with Microsoft, Google and all other major search-engine linking guidelines and best-practices recommendations.  The truth is that LinksManager’s patented technology makes it almost impossible for anyone to use it to spam the search engines even if they want to.

Such schemes as “link farming” and automatically submitting a site link to vast numbers of websites simultaneously, both of which Chilcott correctly identifies as having the potential to get a site “banished” by an engine, cannot be implemented from within LinksManager.  Neither by accident or on purpose.

Bottomline

Are we happy that Microsoft has reaffirmed that intelligent, linking-for-the-end-user exchanges are an excellent way to boost a site’s traffic and possibly improve it’s return position?

Of course, we are.  It’s always nice when a mega-rich and famous authority figure supports your position.

LinksManager’s subscribers and every other small businessperson trying to earn an honest income on the web is finally hearing the truth about linking and search engines from a truly unimpeachable source.

Microsoft has, at last, driven the ugly fear-and-falsehood balloons launched by a pack of self-serving SEO scoundrels from the cyberspace skies.

Major search engines are starting to pull their heads out of the sand and comment frankly on the hoodoo-voodoo pseudo-science known as search-engine optimization.

Webmasters can enjoy absolute confidence in the powerful, low-to-no cost branding and business-building tool that linking is, always has been and will continue to be.

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Why should I link to pages with low Google Page Rank?

Poor question. A better one is why not link to pages with low PR if they offer a relevant and easy path to your website for people who might be interested in what you have to offer.

Let’s consider both these questions by filtering them through five realities.

1. About 99 million of the internet’s approximately 110 million websites never appear high enough in Google’s returns to really matter. (”Not high enough to matter” being defined, in this case, as returning in the top ten pages.)

2. Page Rank is largely irrelevant to return position and return position is the only thing that determines if you will get any business via Google’s natural search results.

A lot of people still don’t believe this but it’s true, Google’s algorithms pay precious little attention to PR when assigning return positions.

Let’s turn that around and make it a question: True or false, Google’s algorithms pay precious little attention to PR when assigning return positions?

Dateline: Thursday, Nov. 13, 2008
Browser: Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2
Search Term: Car dealers Los Angeles
Search Engine: Google
Page Rank Reporting Agent: Google Toolbar 5 Beta
Page Ranks Of Natural Returns From Position One To Position Ten: 0,2,4,4,3,2,2,4,2,4

Alrighty, then. Let’s ask that question one more time. True or false, Google’s algorithms pay precious little attention to PR when assigning return positions?

Based on the evidence, what do you think?

3. Good, relevant links may positively affect your PR and/or return position regardless of their PR and bogus/irrelevant/automatically harvested links may negatively affect your PR regardless of their PR.

Well, yes, of course, if you have 500 organic, progressively added, properly positioned (no more than 100 per page), relevant links with a PR of eight, nine or ten it will probably — but not necessarily — make your site look more impressive to Googlebot than if you have 500 similar links with PRs of three or four. But that does not mean that all those lower PR sites can’t improve your site’s status at all.

Google, as it has said repeatedly in its official pronouncements, considers links an essential part of the web experience and uses them as a factor in its rankings. Good links are good links and can be beneficial, bad links are bad links and often are harmful. The difference between how a link to a so-called “popular” website with a high PR and a less “popular” one with a lower PR impacts a site’s ranking is usually just a matter of degree.

4. Links to quality, compatible sites with low or even no PR cannot hurt your ranking and can drive traffic and customers to your site.

There is nothing in the Google Guidelines that says they penalize sites for having good but not highly PR’d links. In fact, the guidelines clearly spell out the type of black-hat linking practices that may affect a site’s ranking adversely: link schemes designed to increase ranking or PageRank (and) links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web. The guidelines say nothing about downgrading anyone for a good link from a relatively new or otherwise under-ranked site.

Since there’s nothing there about penalizing good links to low-ranked sites, it is illogical and a bad business practice to refuse a link that would provide valuable information to your end users and/or a portal for new prospects to discover your site just because that link might not also give you a bit of SE boost.

Once again, we can explore this concept a bit by referencing Los Angeles-area car dealers in Google’s terribly useful little toolbar.

Here are ten major-brand L.A. area car dealerships and their home page Page Ranks.

Cerritos Ford: 3
Felix Chevrolet and Cadillac: 2
Honda of Hollywood: 3
Universal City Nissan: 0
Toyota of Hollywood: 3
Mercedes-Benz of Beverly Hills: 0
Bob Smith BMW: 3
Midway Ford: 3
Vista Lexus: 3
South Bay Chrysler Jeep Dodge: 2

Hhhmmm … all those bully boys who clog the SEO forums with their uninformed or deliberately biased bilge would almost certainly say you better watch out, you better not cry and, most of all, you better not link to sites with such pathetically low Page Ranks. (Sorry about the “Santa Claus is Coming To Town” bit, but it is beginning to look a lot like Christmas except at Circuit City and the other big box stores.)

Yes, that’s what most self-anointed SEO gurus would say. But what about you?

What if you owned a car insurance agency, a detail shop, a limo service, a seat cover and window-tinting service?

Would you refuse to trade a link with the Beverly Hills Mercedes dealer because Google considers a luxury car shop in one of the world’s richest communities unimportant and worthy only of a zero rating?

Are you crazy?

Would you tell Midway Ford to go to hell with their link because their PR is 3?

Are you stupid?  Midway’s one of the biggest Ford dealers in the country.

How about Universal City Nissan, which has been Hollywood’s premier vendor of that marquee since it was called Datsun? Would Google’s bestowing a zero PR on them make them an inappropriate link partner for your business?

Of course, not. Linking is all about marketing, not statistics. Car dealerships are a great place to market car insurance, auto detailing, limo services, seat covers, etc.

What we’re talking about here is what LinksManager calls “linking for end users” and what Google describes as the “basic principle (of) mak(ing) pages primarily for users, not search engines.”

Both those definitions are accurate as far they go, but they stop far short of the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Because the truth about these kind of links is that they can significantly contribute to your bottom line despite their hosts’ low PR. The truth is that these links are extremely likely to be seen and clicked by precisely the people most likely to be in the market to buy what you are selling.

The truth is that connections like this are not just links, they’re golden links.  Free links at least as good and in many cases better than the best links money can buy.

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October 9, 2008 — Wall Street, New York: General Motors closing price on the New York Stock Exchange today reached its lowest level in 58 years, $4.76.

Even more troubling to many observers, the former “biggest auto maker” on the planet’s market capitalization declined to $2.6 billion, a drop of more than 94 percent in just eight years and a full $48 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars lower than its net worth following the 1929 stock market crash.

What do these dismal statistics have to do with you or any other entrepreneur running a small or medium business website that has nothing to do with the automobile business?

More, much more, than you may have guessed.

Just like General Motors, the once-upon-a-time blue chip investment, your business has to keep operating and attracting customers or it will die regardless of the state of the economy around it.

GM must keep buying parts, meeting payrolls, building cars, shipping those cars to dealers and marketing those cars to the public.  It doesn’t matter whether its share price is $1 or $1000, If it stops doing those things, it will cease to exist altogether or be swallowed up by a (probably foreign) competitor.

Of the items on the GM survival “to-do” list, marketing is the most important.  Without marketing, fewer cars will be sold, dealer inventories will swell, factory orders will go down, assembly lines will be shuttered, cash flow will shrink.  In other words, without marketing everything on the list will be negatively impacted and collapse will become inevitable.

Because in good times or bad, with a government bailout or without one, companies which stop promoting their products will sooner or later fail.  The reason is simple, customers don’t just fall into a retail or e-tail brick-and-mortar or cyberspace store.  Customers have to be purchased.

It’s called, in the Fortune 1000, the cost of customer acquisition and calculating the right amount to invest in buying each customer is a tricky business.  Some companies, like Amazon, have spent literally billions on it and become heroic success stories.  Others, like XM Radio and Sirius, overspent to the point where they were forced to merge with competitors.  Still others (does anyone remember Webvan?) have gone out of business by spending three or four dollars on customer acquisition for each customer dollar earned.

So two things are obvious — so obvious that even the numb n … ah … numb nabobs running GM have apparently managed to figure them out. 1. You can’t just stop trying to acquire new customers because business is bad but, (2.) controlling customer acquisition costs is much more important in a soft economy than in a robust one.

First, let’s take a quick look at what GM is doing to resolve the seeming contradiction between item one and item two and then let’s try and apply what we find to a typical SOHO web business.

Out of the box, GM slashed its overall advertising budget almost across the board.  Super Bowl 2009 spots, Emmy and Academy Award commercials and lush factory-sponsored metropolitan newspaper ads are just some of the programs now off the 2008/2009 media calendar.  (Local GM dealers and regional dealer associations continue to advertise in newspapers, however.)

Even GM’s online advertising budget, which the ailing automaker had indicated was untouchable as recently as two months ago, was yanked onto the butcher block and fiercely trimmed in October.

As this point you may be saying “seems like they cut everything, what’s with the ‘almost?’ ”

The almost is product placement, on which GM is increasing spending even in the face of declining stock prices, auto sales and revenues.  Product placement as in spending big money to have one of Christian Slater’s personas in the NBC series “My Own Worst Enemy” drive a Chevy Camaro and the other drive a Chevy Traverse.

“When you’re integrated into a program, your product adds a presence,” says GM’s director of marketing and branded entertainment Dino Bernacchi, explaining the decision to invest more heavily in product placement. “Having our vehicles placed there (creates) a dialog with the consumer.”

Wow.  Just think of it.  General Motors is paying millions to do something you get to do for free — integrate your product with someone else’s and establish a dialog with that other person’s customers.

That’s right, we’re talking about linking.  (What else?)  A reciprocal link integrates your site and message into another site’s far more tightly, seamlessly and usefully than any paid listing ever could.  It adds your content to the other site’s content and their content to yours to create a whole that is not only greater than the sum of its parts, but much more commercial as well.

Think of a dozen sites as yard sales each advertised separately in a free classified newspaper, each miles or blocks from the other, each offering a handful of things for sale.  Than think of an ad for a “nine-family” or “neighborhood” yard sale with hundreds of used and useful items.  Which type of sale are the majority of potential buyers more likely to go to, the small individual one or the mega multi-vendor one?

GM’s increasing emphasis on product integration is relevant to web marketing in one other crucial way.  The majority of product placements ads (such as Julia Roberts getting on a FedEx truck for delivery “by 10 a.m. the next business day” in the film Runaway Bride) are sold for a flat fee rather than based on ratings points or cost per thousand (CPM) viewers.  In a slumping economy, the number of sales per thousand viewers of each commercial goes down and GM and other major advertisers don’t get nearly as big a bang for each rating point buck spent as they do in a vibrant economy.

In our world, the virtual world, the same situation is true.  Pretty much the same number of people are looking at commercial websites now as in 2007 (even people in foreclosure can dream, can’t they?), but substantially fewer are buying.  Translated into dollars, that means that every time a site’s conversion rate on paid search ads goes down 10 percent, the site operator’s customer acquisition cost goes up 20 percent. A 50 percent conversion rate decline actually doubles the customer acquisition cost.

Unless, of course, the clickthroughs are coming through natural, organic, no-cost links.  These links, whether one-way or reciprocal, are not only the heart and soul of the internet, they are all upside and no downside.  Your cost stays the same — ZERO — whether your clickthrough conversion rate is 50 percent or 5 percent, 20 percent or 2 percent.

Since there is absolutely no way to lose money on free links, every sale you make through a natural link goes right onto the plus side of the QuickBooks (which would be a nice example of a product placement, except we’re not — drat — getting paid for it) ledger.

In any economy, particularly today’s, what more can a businessperson ask for?

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Time flies!  Birthdays and anniversaries come and go on a rigid annual schedule, each one neither more or less significant or momentous than the one which came before or will arrive next.  Of course some birthdays and anniversaries are more significant than others.  Some are platinum bowls and gold goblets, others are only silver shot glasses and tin beer cans.

Here at LinksManager, we’re celebrating one of the true biggies — our tenth anniversary — this week and we thought it might be nice to mark the occasion by asking our founder and CEO Joel Lesser to share some thoughts about LinksManager’s past, present, and future.

Here’s what he told us:

Many webmasters forget or, if they’re very young, never knew that linking wasn’t much of a factor in search-engine optimization when we started in 1998.  Google, which virtually shares a birthday with LinksManager, was just getting started and the popular search engines of the day were all about keywords and metatags, not links.

So we didn’t develop LinksManager as an SEO product at all.  Our goal — pure and simple — was to save webmasters time by streamlining a host of mind-numbing tasks including managing link requests, categorizing links, creating end-user friendly, search-capable links pages, and checking for reciprocation.

The LinksManager development cycle was about 18 months.  We could have written it much faster if we had been willing to fully automate the program, but we refused to take that path.  We were determined that LinksManager would be editor-based and making it both efficient and fast while leaving significant decision-making in the hands of end-users was a huge challenge.

In retrospect, the decision to retain human control of the process certainly seems like a search engine “thingee” since being editor-based is what makes LinksManager uniquely compliant with all major search-engines’ current quality guidelines.  But it really had nothing to do with the search engines.  None of those guidelines even existed ten years ago.  We just felt we would be doing webmasters a disservice if we made it possible for elements to be added or subtracted from their sites without their knowledge.

The biggest technological hurdle we had to surmount was implementing accurate and timely link checking.  If we crawled very frequently, some webmasters got upset because we were using too much bandwidth, which was a lot more expensive in the late ’90s.  If we crawled less frequently, other webmasters said the reports weren’t up-to-date enough.

Truth is our link-checking system stimulated an awful lot of traffic on webmaster forums in those early years and many of those posts were tremendously useful in helping us re-engineer that part of the program to become more accurate with less spidering in 2004.

For the record, LinksManager today is the most accurate link-checking tool in cyberspace because our patented technology gives each link its own queue timeline and enables us to store data so that it can be more productively reused.  We fully intend to keep LinksManager number one by continuing to tweak it almost constantly.

Talking about tweaking, one of the significant features of LinksManager is that it’s not a downloadable.  It’s an application service, which makes rolling system improvements out to the entire user base a transparent, seamless process.  Along those lines, we recently streamlined the interface between LinksManager and LinkPartners.com.  The recent changes to LinkPartners are still in what we would consider beta testing so if you have suggestions or comments, we are certainly interested in your feedback.  We are also happy to announce that we have already been working on a new and improved version of the LinksManager Toolbar which is currently being tested.  We are have also begin work on a revision to the entire LinksManager Control Panel so its even more user friendly.

Looking back over LinksManager’s first ten years, three accomplishments really stand out.  The first is the way in which we revolutionized link management by giving webmasters the power to regenerate and upload their links pages in near-real time without having to manually change their HTML files to add or subtract links or categories.  That was our most popular feature the day we opened for business and it’s still our most popular feature 3650 days later.

The second thing I value most is the way we have consistently managed to save our users time, and thus money, without ever abandoning our white hat.  In an industry full of black-hat, spammy full-duplex linking schemes and SEO spam, LinksManager continues to lead the industry while allowing — some might even say compelling — our users to maintain editorial discretion and obtain links one at a time in the gradual, natural manner recommended by Google and the other search engines.

Thirdly, I’m extremely proud that our editor-based concept was awarded a patent, the only patent ever issued for a link-management application.  The patent, which has been successfully enforced numerous times, protects both us and the webmaster community from ripoff artists offering products that look and sound like LinksManager but offer only a small subset of such exclusive LinksManager features, many of them suggested by our users including:  Linklets’ multi-format data-publishing capability, LinkBlogs, auto link expiration, link-request activation, deep-linking, import/export functionality, custom mailers and, of course, our unique blacklist module that allows webmasters to automatically reject link requests based on keywords.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of webmaster helper applications have come and gone in the past ten years, but LinksManager is still here, bigger and better than ever … as is linking itself.

Linking with other relevant websites has been a significant internet marketing element since the dawn of cyber time, which is one of the few “truths” that have remained unchanged in the ten years since we started LinksManager.  It’s also one of the core web realities we don’t expect to change over the next ten.

Links are without question the coin of the internet realm and will remain so unless and until somebody designs an entirely new World Wide Web architecture.

On our tenth birthday, we want to say a hearty Thank You to our users who have helped make LinksManager what is is today.  Keep your comments and suggestions coming!  We look forward to another great ten years of servicing our users and providing you with first class support. 

Joel Lesser, LinksManager President / CEO

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Did you know your LinksManager account gives you the ability to painlessly — or at least virtually painlessly — do all kinds of otherwise tedious chores besides manage your linking campaign?

If you answered “Yes” to that question based on your knowledge of advanced features like LinkBlogs and affiliate-link management you’re only partially right.  LinksManager can also do a number of other useful and clever things that would otherwise require the use of specialized and often complex applications.

Like creating and maintaining a database.  A database such as the one at Hurricane Housing Search.com.

Established three years ago by LinksManager parent Creative Net Ventures in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, HurricaneHousingSearch.com is a cost-and-advertising-free online vehicle for linking (there’s our favorite word again) people who have been forced from their homes by storms like Katrina and Gustav to homeowners offering temporary housing to hurricane victims.

Logging onto the site a storm refugee or emergency relief worker can search for available temporary housing by state or by keywords such as “family”, “single-mom”, etc.  A recent search for “pet,” for example, turned up listings such as “l have a 2 bedroom house with 4 cats. I can accommodate a single person or small family. Cats welcome. Can also provide a shelter for a few animals.”

On the provider side, homeowners willing to share their property during national emergencies are offered a comprehensive submission form in which they can describe the housing they have available, list details relating to such things as pets, children, handicapped access, etc. and specify how long they want their listing to stay live.

To put it simply, the Hurricane Housing Search website is an editable, searchable database just like hundreds of thousands of others available all over the World Wide Web.  What makes it special is that it was created entirely with LinksManager without any need for an SQL or other database-creation program.

More specifically, it was created entirely with tools contained in your LinksManager Control Panel and a bit of support from the LinksManager Help Desk, which is always available to you free of charge as part of your LinksManager subscription.

That’s nice, isn’t it?

But does it have anything to do with you and your website?

Quite possibly it does.  It all depends on the nature of your business and whether that business involves maintaining lists of things that regularly change.

Let’s say you rent things … resort cabins, cars, tools, boats or anything else.

You can, of course, skate along by demanding that potential customers call or email you to discover what products are available on a given day and make a reservation for them.

On the other hand, a rich database giving information about, for example, each cabin and its rates and availability is far more end-user friendly.  And allowing people to click a link and make a reservation directly from a particular listing is even more user friendly.  As is having the database automatically update to show the dates when a given item isn’t available.

There are, obviously, many ways to accomplish this.  You can create a database using Microsoft Access or a similar program, post it to your website via FTP and either find and modify a packaged submission form script compatible with your site host or write your own PHP or CGI script to match the protocols supported by your host.

Or you can create a categorized page in LinksManager, contact the LinksManager Helpdesk, tell one of our tech wizards the custom fields you’d like added to the page and let us take care of the rest.  One thing you won’t have to do is hassle with scripts — LinksManager is a hosted application that automatically creates pages and forms configured to run seamlessly on your website.

The other thing you won’t have to worry about is what to do if the published database doesn’t run quite the way you expected it to.  With LinksManager, expert in-country service and support is never more than a helpdesk request away.

Which is a ton more than the publisher of Access can say.

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Dear Matt Cutts:

We’re not trying to get you fired, but given the state of today’s economy and the pressing need for Fortune 500 companies to adapt to the new realities by slashing labor costs (much as every webmaster on Planet Earth has to adapt to new internet realities whenever you and your cohorts at Google decide to proclaim them) we feel it is our duty as good corporate citizens to suggest ways in which your workload could be significantly decreased.

Since this is the LinksManager blog, it will come as no surprise to you that our suggestions for lightening your workload have to do with eliminating link spam and scam attempts.

Understand, we’re not talking about ferreting out link abusers and punishing them, as you’ve long been trying to do with limited success. What we are talking about is eliminating search-engine link spamming by taking the potential benefit out of it. In other words, making it pointless because someone who succeeded in “fooling” your team would gain no Page Rank or return position advantage whatsoever.

Furthermore, we believe that Google’s adoption of our suggestions would improve the web experience for the vast majority of end users and — in capital letters AND — result in more accurate and useful Google search returns.

So, if you can spare a few moments away from the bloody-walled rooms where the Page Rank Unibombers are gently interrogated, pull up a chair, a pool float or a bar stool and lend us your ear.

For fun, let’s start with something we can probably agree on: The vast majority of SE web spamming schemes related to linking fall into one of two classes. Those that offer to sell webmasters vast numbers of random reciprocal links delivered automatically without any regard for suitability, relevancy or quality and those that offer bogus one-way links generated via three or more-way link exchanges or shell websites that exist only to host the scammer’s outbound links.

Now that the fun part’s over, let’s continue with something we absolutely won’t agree on: Google’s guidelines — your rules, in other words — are not only what inspired the perpetrators of these fraudulent linking schemes in making their career choice, they — the guidelines — are also what has enabled those scammers to live so long and prosper so richly.

Consider the way things were — or at least the way you were — during Google’s formative years. Reciprocal links were king, they were considered hot ballots in Google’s beauty pageant of life. Racking up links was like getting votes in baseball’s all-star competition, the players with the most votes made it into the big game … the top of the returns list.

OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But it is fair to say that in attempting to eliminate the evils of earlier search engines that screamed “jackpot” whenever a site operator inserted the same hidden keyword into a page 2750 times, Google did go more than a bit overboard in rewarding sites with large numbers of essentially unevaluated links.

The results were both predictable and inevitable. Operators began bargaining, begging, lying, cheating and stealing to get links and end users were treated to such truly doleful apparitions as web rings and free-for-all link exchange pages. Ugh!

Fast forward a few years into the early 2000s and we find you trying to limit link abuse by publishing a guideline “suggesting” that webmasters not put more than 100 links on a page. Turns out it didn’t require too much effort to spread 1,000 links over ten pages instead of one and life went on as before until the guidelines were happily changed to favor relevant links from quality sites.

Too bad you didn’t stop right there. If you had there would be no need for this blog … not to mention a few zillion other blogs, rants, queries, protests and bloody, sweaty tears scattered from one end of the web to the other.

The reason you should have stopped there is because, as you very well know, quality, relevant links between sites are what make the web work. Despite the fact that very few people have used the phrase since Al Gore — not realizing that outraging nine or ten Florida computer geeks could cost him the presidency — made a mockery of it (and himself), the web is an information superhighway and like all highways the more lanes (links, in this case) it has, the more smoothly and efficiently it handles traffic.

Unfortunately, however, someone at Google traffic cop central decided that demanding links be valuable, useful, non-spamming, etc. etc. wasn’t good enough. Suddenly, the means became as important as the ends. Googlebot became as interested in a link’s origin as it did in its quality. One-way links were perceived as having more glitz than reciprocal links and a whole new black-arts industry devoted to schemes intended to generate bogus one-way links via three- and more-way link exchanges and dummy sites containing nothing but pay-for-play outgoing links was born.

Bottomline is that despite the fortune in financial and human resources you SEs spend in trying to root these scams out, the bad guys (i.e. spam artists) have little or no problem staying at least one or two steps ahead of the good guys (you and yours) because your rules are so complex, unwieldy and arbitrary you can’t revise them as fast as the con artists can develop new workarounds to evade them.

Our solution is simple and two-fold.

1. Get out of the mass numbers game. Allow — encourage, even — a million links to bloom but only evaluate a handful of them for ranking purposes. In other words, program Googlebot to only consider a maximum of, for example, 50 random links each time it visits a site and use those links to establish a “plus” or “minus” rating factor based solely on their relevancy and quality.

2. Stop caring about whether any given link is one-way, two-way, sideways or upside down. Follow your own oft-stated advice to think about things from the point of view of end users. Does an end user care whether a link is reciprocated if it leads him to information he finds useful? Does that same user find following a one-way link to an irrelevant site rewarding?

If you do both these things, what happens?

A number of things, all of them good.

First, all the “buy automated links by the pound” schemes disappear. No point in paying for hundreds of links if nobody’s counting higher than 50.

Second, the incentive to have only quality links increases because one bad apple in a small barrel makes a lot more of a mess than two bad apples in a huge barrel.

Third, website operators no longer have to balance the benefits of generating traffic via lots of links versus the possibility of violating some hidden line in the sand separating what a search engine considers a proper amount of links from what it thinks is an excessive number.

Fourth, end users would have access to more relevant links to streamline their passage along the path to enlightenment, i.e. their inquiry into the relative merits of seven brands of toasters.

Fifth, site owners with only a few links would benefit (or be penalized) by the quality of those links to the same degree as owners of sites with hundreds of links.

Sixth, three-way linking and storefront outbound link scams would become irrelevant and the black-hat entrepreneurs running them would have to retire to wherever their offshore bank accounts are.

Seventh, webmasters could concentrate on giving their site visitors the links they need without wrenching their necks trying to see if the Google Monster is gaining on them.

So there it is, Matt, the official LinksManager Twelve-Minus-Five-Step Google Anti-Spam Czar Workaholic Recovery and Search-Engine Improvement Program. Please feel free to share it with your opposite numbers at engines Y, M and A.

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Attempting to fool Google and other search engines into thinking three-way links are actually one-way links is a no-no.  It is one of those schemes Google calls “search-engine spam” and the rest of the legitimate WWW universe, including all the other major search engines, considers it a “black-hat” SEO practice.

Every search engine integrity team in the industry knows about three-way linking scams and has devised ways to identify it and punish sites which practice it.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog or of LinkManager’s exclusive Linking School, you already know quite a bit about three-way linking and why you should be leery of dark-side operators trying to seduce you into doing it.  In fact, you may even be wondering why we’re covering it again.

The answer is that extremely diligent, time-consuming and stressful research (namely looking through the junk mail folder) has uncovered the most perfect specimen of a three way-linking come-on we’ve ever seen.  A seductive proposal so sublime, so off-the-wall, that anyone encountering it will feel hit on like they’ve never been hit on before.  Hit on by a bursting nitrous oxide balloon or a Guinness Book of World Records-sized pie in the face.

A seductive proposal so inelegant and totally resistible that it’s impossible to believe anyone with the intelligence of a gnat would buy into it.  Yet many people undoubtedly have, just as many threw away their life savings in the belief that some crook in Nigeria was waiting to transfer the contents of the state treasury into the bank account of a brain-dead American on a spam mail sucker list.

So here’s the “Pleasant Day” three-way linking solicitation directly as it came to us, complete with misspellings, bad grammar and gmail security warning:

Hello Webmaster,

A Pleasant Day to You!

Knowing that quality inbound, one-way links are among the best sources of improved ranking in search engines, it is a huge part of SEO campaign and for sure in yours too. For this reason, I am presently searching for potential linking partners for my website (Mail Scanner warning X domain attempting to be Y domain intentionally removed). In this regard, I found your site and have appropriately considered for a link exchange. My sole intention is to have a link from your site and do the same to you in return.

I would appreciate your favorable reply with a timely quality reciprocal link to your site from our (domain intentionally removed)/resources.htm choose category OR (domain intentionally removed)/direcrory choose category.

In the end, we will be helping each other for better rankings in search engines.

My site details are as follows:

URL: (domain intentionally removed)

Title: Sell My Property Quickly

Description: Bastion Properties UK Based leading property buying services offers to buy your property quickly for fast cash. You have to sell your property, house quickly for fast cash.

In the time that you have completed a link to my site, please contact me so that I may be able to confirm it and appropriately link back to you. We are glad to have link relationship with you.

Hope to hear from you soon

Kind Regards, Salil

Hhhmmm … what exactly is wrong with this word picture?  Aside from the basic fact that it seems to be inviting you to participate in a scheme to “help each other for better rankings” by violating Google guidelines and anti-spam policies?

Let’s start at the top.

First, it’s a piece of spam addressed to “Hello Webmaster” and destined to be automatically junked by any non-prehistoric email client with an activated junk filter.  Good link solicitation letters should be a bit more personalized, such as “Dear Bastion Properties” or “Dear Bastion Properties Webmaster.”  This is especially important in trying to get link request emails past junk filters. N ote: You can safely eliminate the personal greeting if you are responding to a “link-invitation” or “contact webmaster” link on a site.

Moving along, there’s the “possible fraud” warning from the mail scanner.  Let’s stop and think.  Why would someone sending a few million copies of this particular email from their site want mail scanners and other internet traffic cops to think the message was coming from some other site?  Duh, duh, duh, DUH!

We’ve got it.  Because they’re doing something wrong and they don’t want to get caught.  And they don’t want to get caught because they will be punished — probably by having their site delisted from Google — if they are caught.

But wait, there’s more.  Salil’s “sole intention is to have a link from your site and do the same to you in return.”  We’ll, there’s one point on which he or she ain’t lying, the idea is definitely to “do you” … do you as in “do you in” not do you as in “having sex with you.”

Because what Salil really wants is for you to link to his legitimate (or not) property sales site in return for getting a link from one of his two so-called SEO sites (Seologistics and Adsrack.)  A quick look at the Seologistics site (domain intentionally removed) was non-existent as of July 23 is enough to convince most anyone that it is everything Mother Google ever warned you about … a shoddy front for bottling search-engine snake oil.

Links from sites like this can accomplish only one thing, hurt the ranking of the sites linked to them.  They are never relevant, they are from web pages generally filled with search engine spam, and they often reside in bad neighborhoods. Likewise, linking to Salil’s property site — even if it happens to be legit — will probably not be relevant to your site’s content (unless you happen to be in the real estate business) and can negatively affect your ranking because of that irrelevancy.

So what’s the point of Salil’s scam?  What’s he trying to achieve?  That part’s simple, he’s trying to attract bogus “one-way links” from legitimate sites like yours to inflate his PageRank.  He does this by offering a three-way trade.  You link your white-hat site to his and he reciprocates by linking his black-hat site to you.

In theory, he wins and you lose.  In practice, you both lose.  Google and the other engines are very good at spotting and punishing three-way scams even when the promoters aren’t as stupid as Salil, who made Matt Cutts‘ job very easy by using some email flim-flam that threw up red flags on email servers around the globe.

Unfortunately, the engines are not as good at separating the perpetrators from the innocent bystanders.  Or, maybe, they just don’t think there are any innocent bystanders since they’ve made it abundantly clear that three-way linking is a bad practice and a guideline violation.  Therefore, they may take the somewhat justified position that you are as guilty for accepting Salil’s “generous offer” as he is for extending it.  Bottomline is that when one part of a nefarious linking triangle is uncovered all three sites involved risk being spanked.

The moral of this message is simple:  Beware of spammers bearing gift bags that might blow up in your face and select your link partners on the basis of the benefits their sites offer your end users.

As we’ve said here before over the years, end users come in all sizes, shapes, colors and genders.  Some of them, like Googlebot, even come in tower cases filled with silicon chips.  Despite their differences, all these end users, most especially Googlebot, are looking for one thing:  Quality.  Quality content, quality navigation, and quality links.

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This is not, to quote Charles Dickens, a tale of two cities.  It is instead a tale of two hours, two methodologies, two means to the same end.

To save you the suspense, we’ll give you the tale’s ending right here at the beginning … one of the methods is smart and productive, the other is dumb and counterproductive.

The truth is that linking, done ethically and effectively, requires some investment of time.  You can’t just snap your fingers, say “abracadabra” and watch high-quality, relevant links instantly appear on or to your website.

Even if you subscribe to LinksManager, you can’t just log into your Control Panel or click on your Link Exchange Browser Toolbar, select a radio button and automatically add links to your pages.  You still have to do some of the legwork yourself.  Your contribution to the effort, maintaining editorial control over your links, is, in fact, exactly what makes LinksManager so effective at adding real value to your site ,and ensures that LinksManager is fully compliant with all major search engine webmaster quality and content guidelines … including Google’s.

So now, let’s set the stage for our two-hour tale.  You’re sitting in front of your computer.  You operate a site selling beach accessories — sand mats, tanning supplies, canopies, body boards — the whole nine yards.  Everything but swim suits.  Since swim suits and beach supplies go together like sun and burn, you realize that a reciprocal link between you and some swimwear vendors could drive new customers to your site and, possibly, improve your search-engine rankings due to the high mutual relevancy of the sites.

You are also committed to an ethical, intelligent, search-engine-friendly linking strategy that involves finding, soliciting and gradually adding quality relevant links to your site.   And you need to take care of occasional housekeeping chores relating to your existing links.  You have, essentially, two ways to do all this: Manually or via LinksManager.

Using that scenario, let’s see what you might hope to accomplish in an hour of “manual” labor.

Minute 0-4: Go through incoming email finding and picking out any link solicitation requests.

Minute 4-9: Visit and evaluate prospective link partners’ sites.

Minute 9-13: Respond to solicitations you accept.

Minute 13-45: Go to your site, visit all your link partners’ sites and search to make sure your link is still active on one of their pages.

Minute 45-47: Wait for your web building software to boot up.

Minute 47-53: Navigate to your links page, delete dead links and reformate page.

Minute 53-59: Format two or three new links to fit your page design, place them on the page and correct the spacing between items.

Minute 59-60: Search for and examine swim suit vendor sites and send email link exchange requests to the webmasters of those which meet your standards.

Question: What was the most important task you hoped to complete during this hour?  Answer:  Find some potential link partners who e-tail bathing suits.  And how much time did you have to do that in? One minute.  Routine grunt work occupied the other 59.

Now let’s run the same scenario using LinksManager.

Minute 0-1: Login to your LinksManager Control Panel

Minute 1-6: Examine your Pending Link list, click the sites you’d like to visit and respond to each link request by clicking on “approve” or “delete.”

Minute 6-9: Go to the Control Panel’s Reciprocal Link Checker and scan the link list, which is continuously updated by LinkManager’s proprietary and patended link checking spider.  If any sites are identified as not containing a link to your site or as being offline, you have instant point-and-click options to automatically email a query to the webmaster, temporarily remove the link from your site, or permanently delete the link.  If you decide to delete the link, your links page will be automatically adjusted and reformatted to accommodate the change.

Minute 9-12: Quickly and effortlessly integrate two or three new links into your links page with just a few mouse clicks.

Minute 12-60: Search for and examine swim suit e-commerce sites and send a Link Exchange Request Email to the webmasters of those which meet your standards.

Wow, LinksManager has just cut 47 minutes off your typical linking “work hour.”

Forty-eight minutes you can spend using LinksManager’s advanced tools for finding new link partners.

Forty-eight minutes you can use to attract higher-quality link partners by crafting better Link Exchange Request Emails.

Or 48 minutes you can allow to accumulate until you’ve saved enough time to take a day off and go to the beach.

After all, you shouldn’t expect your customers to buy products you haven’t field tested yourself.

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