I love to show people how they can actually get up to 1 million hits per month using reciprocal links.  People are doing it right now all over the web and have the live server log files to prove it.  And you probably are thinking, “Yeah they are on top of the search engine lists!”  Actually, top listing on the search engines is not the cause of their hits!  It’s a side-effect.

Reciprocal links alone put them in the Million-a-Month Club.  Reciprocal links, good ones, can do much more for you than any search engine ever will. 

“Wow Jack, that’s a bold statement, got anything to back that up?”

How about the server logs of people getting over a million hits per month who did nothing more than seek out link partners and ONLY submitted to each major search engine ONCE?  Would that convince you?

Well check it out.  Here are two sites that use reciprocal linking almost exclusively with all other forms of advertising bringing in a relatively negligible amount of traffic.   When looking at their live server log files, pay attention to the following things:

1.) Qualified traffic from reciprocal links.

Look at the Refers Report and check the section labeled '/'. Underneath you will find which links and search engines are sending these websites traffic.

) Search engine traffic to the sites’ Link Directory pages.

In the Refers Report, find the headings that start with /links/, with the name of the Link Directory pages directory after. Search engines send lots of traffic to these pages. These pages were never submitted to the search engines!

Example 1:  CTEX CD Replication holds the number one keyword placement on Yahoo for "CD replication."  How did they get there?  Link popularity!  Check out their live server log files at:  http://www.ctexinc.com/stats/index.html

Example 2:  Toolady.com is a website that has been using reciprocal links for a long time and her web site traffic was generated completely reciprocal links!  In four months it became one of the most heavily trafficked bird web sites on the internet. No other form of marketing was done.  Check out her server log files here:

http://toolady.com/reports/log_bird.html

So you tell me, are search engines the almighty savior you thought they were a minute ago?

Relevance of Your Links

Relevance has a lot to do with how a search engine robot will treat you nowadays.  That's why I always talk about the importance of building a link list or "theme index" for your site (call it a reciprocal link exchange) that closely resembles the topics or products you deal with in your site.  (But not those, of course, in direct competition to you.)

Now the FFA and Link Farm people are going to be mad at me, but this is the truth!

Here's a test.  If I fail it you may publicly scorn me!

Go to any FFA page on the web and look for Yahoo.com.   Try Amazon.com, or CocaCola.com...  “There must be TONS of their links on FFA pages - EVERYBODY knows those guys!”  Go ahead and check it out, I'll be here when you get back!

Glad you're back - how many links did you find?  None?  Yikes!

Now go to Altavista.com and type link:yahoo.com in the search window.  What happened?  Well, I just did it and it said:  We found 6,670,578 results.  (By the way, don't you love how the search engine will report millions of links just like it reports none?  Doesn't it seem like they would be like "WOW, six million links!!!")

That's 6,670,578 links pointing to Yahoo.com!!
 

And not a single one from a link farm.  Now don't go getting ideas in your head about getting 6 million links.  You don't need that many to flood your site with enough traffic to keep you selling widgets, or informing the public on the effects on the ozone layer from methane gas produced by cattle.  (“What?” – hey its late, that was the best example I could come up with!  How do I know what you’re into?)

No, you need far fewer links than that to get 1,000,000 hits a month.  And, with a million hits a month, how many methane gas-to-oxygen converters do you think you could sell to farmers to mount on the backs of their cows to protect the ozone layer?  I'd say at least a whole heap!

There is automation software out there that people are using to drastically optimize their link lists and I highly recommend checking them out.  The best and first of its kind can be found at webmastertraffictools.com. 

This software has a fully functioning demo that will spider the web, set up your link directory, AND upload it to your server.  It also does a mail-merge function to personalize all your link requests to other webmasters and mails for you.  All in the DEMO version!

You CAN do all this manually, but it is highly recommended that you at least check out the automation software demo above to see what the best of the best webmasters are using to get those million hits per month.

(Author’s note:  It has not yet been proven whether methane produced by cow “emissions” affects the ozone layer.  Example above is fictional.)

Jack Humphrey