I was just looking through my last few posts and noticed that I have 0 links in them.  I am starting to wonder how important it is to have links heading out of your blog.  I know that in the past it was best to limit your outgoing links while maximizing your incoming.  That is what made directories and the like so popular.  I am starting to wonder if all of that has changed, and whether if you are linking to an authority type site does it really hurt your rankings?

I am going to have to look into this in the near future, it doesn’t mean that if I find out that SEO wise it is better to link in posts that I am going to do it for every post.  A lot of topics that I discuss here aren’t really worth linking, but I will be more active in posting links to articles, tools etc…. that I use, and may even spend some time looking for interested sites to link to.

I am not sure if it is the weather or work, but I have just not been posting enough here.  Sure I mentioned back in June that I was going to be offline for a bit, but a month is way too long.  So here I am.

Not a whole to talk about, I noticed that there was a HUGE pickup of paid submissions to BluenoserLinks recently.  Must be a rumor of a TBPR update in the near future.  I must say that I like it.  I was getting worried that I would have to put some more work into the site, but I guess that people just want to get in there for the update.  I find it strange that they wait so long.  I usually do all of my link grabbing right after the update.  There are two good reasons for this (you should take this time to grab a piece of paper and pen)

1. The links get cheaper.  I am not talking about the links on the pages that just jumped in price, but the new sites.  The sites that people are talking about NOW, or just recently.  Google is fast but they are not that fast.  If you see a site that everyone is talking about, but didn’t get a good jump this time around, buy up some long term links.  They are going to be bigger in the next update.
2. I don’t think that there is much point trying to get links in the last couple of days.  I doubt that Google uses its most recent information for the update, probably a couple of weeks old.  And the older the links and the older the pages the better.  So go out there and buy some links now, and have them there months for the next update.

Well I guess those two points weren’t really earth shattering, but I think that there are a lot of people out there that browse the forums, find out that a PR update is on the way and then try to buy as many links as they can.  For a better idea, always try to get links.  Work on getting a link a day minimum for your site.  That coupled with really good content that people will WANT to link to will get you farther then buying up links at the last minute.

This is my shout out to phpld I love it. I had been using the free biz directory script for BluenoserLinks but was finding it too hard to keep up with. So much spam so little time.

So I went out and decided to try phpLinkDirectory. I love it so far, the admin panel is great and easy to use. The template system is nice and it is very easy to add the payment option.

Yes it is a paid option, but if you are serious about starting a directory then drop the few bucks and get phpld. I am telling you that you will NOT regret it.

First off I sold one of my babies, www.superfreeforums.com The money has changed hands and the transfer shall be complete by end of January. This is a huge lift off of me since I was spending more and more time on this site and not really seeing any results. I guess I was not cut out for the Hosted Forums market.

On the other hand I have been making money with my directory. The directory that I was planning on letting die is simply doing the best out of all of my sites. Not bad for 0 work over the last few months. I didn’t even mention it in any forums. That said I am going to be transferring it to a new script, while archiving the current site. This is simply because the admin features of the one that I am currently using leave a lot to be desired. So I am going to make the jump. I think that the archiving part is going to be the biggest challenge, I don’t want to leave a lot of links just hanging there and then loose rank with the masterful G. But I think that with alittle work I can make it work.

This new script will allow me to use featured sites and have the integration of the paid link directory work MUCH better. I may even try to automate it to the point where I sign in daily, check the queue and that it is it. And for the first few months use ALL of the money that I make for marketing. My other sites can carry the costs so everything I make from the directory is gravy anyway.

I will let you know how it goes.

I spend about 3 hours yesterday reviewing 1000 submissions to my directory.  I am getting so many and making so little that I have revised the rules so that it is now a primarily PAY directory.  All that it costs is $10 which I think is well worth the link in a good directory that I am continually trying to make better.

However I can’t get over what a lot of people try to put over as a website.  They are SPAM. I probably rejected 60% of the sites that I reviewed and some were so bad I banned the submitters, there was also a lot of bad URLs, something that I found strange since the last time I reviewed sites was only a month ago.  So a word of advice if you are going to submit a site to a directory make sure that it is a long term site.

One thing that I did realize when I was browsing the directory was that it was about time to add more categories.  Some are so full there are over 1000 links in them and only 50 links per page.  That is something else that will probably take about 8 hours.  But to pay for that time I am going to write a quick “Sponsored Links” Script that will be on a subscription basis, probably sometime like $10 for the review, and $5 a month after that.  When that is done I will announce it here.

Finially I added an article directory to the site.  This is something that is VERY new to me so I am going to manually add some more articles before announcing the site to the world.