Currently, O.co redirects users to Overstock.com.

Many companies have complained that it has been difficult to find a good .com address, and some are using the launch of the .co domains as a band aid for their fruitless searching for an alternative.

In addition, most registries have strict bans on less than 4 letter domains for many legal and technical reasons; the fact that .co seems to be unconcerned with these problems, makes it seem to be “new thinking”.

One fact that many overlook is that the slick new marketed URL, .co, is just the Internet country code for Colombia. It has been around for years, prior to the current marketing trick, and no one really seemed to notice before.

Consider that new or old, the extensions can be confusing.

When the CCTLD naming conventions were being held, Scotland overlooked the importance and as a result .sc is for “Seychelles” and Scotland has no unique cctld.

No one ever said that the internet was fair. If they did, they probably should be shot.

Prior marketing tactics, like .tv for Tuvalu, .cc for Cocos Keeling, .mp for Marianas and .ws for Samoa have enjoyed marginal success, but not ever making the dent in the .com market-share, that they had all hoped.

According to .CO Internet SAS,  39,000 applicants have sought .co addresses since they became available for registration in February. They contend that there are  70 percent of the brands listed in the BrandFinance top 500, including companies like Nike, eBay, Coca-Cola, Apple and Amazon, but nothing close to the $350,000, paid by Overstock.

Far from philanthropic, rather, .CO Internet SAS seeks maximized profits, and charges premium prices for preferred and generic domain names; this “preferred stock” line of names will be auctioned off at a later date.

Conversely, the .uk domain name turned 25 recently and its birthday was celebrated by its more than 8.5 million domain names and holders.

The registrar responsible for .uk, Nominet, is a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee, unlike the profit machine that .co is hoping to be.

This means that under British law, it can have members, but not shareholders, pays no dividends and its charges cover running costs.

Anyone with an interest in the Internet may join more than 2,800 Nominet members from all areas of the Internet industry.

Nominet also resolves disputes such as cybersquatting, it runs the DNS infrastructure that keeps .uk working, and It also runs the Tier 1 registry for UK Enum.

This is a unique service that combines telephone numbers and the Domain Name System to simplify the way telephone calls over the Internet work. Enum lets callers know if you can receive VoIP calls.

Nominet research has shown that 77% of British consumers preferred to use a .uk rather than a .com when searching for information online.

Earlier this year, the controversial Digital Economy Act, passed, which gave the secretary of state ultimate control of Nominet, despite its years of successful autonomous operation and a fierce lobbying campaign to stay independent.

Its desire for independence online is not unique however; recently German glass and component company Schott AG has filed a trademark application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for “.schott” for “Registration of domain names (legal services); management of domain names; renting or leasing of domain names; allocation of domain names; trading in domain names.”

The issue arises with US Trademark law as the German glass company “Schott Glass” ( no pun intended initially) owns the trademark for “Schott” and domain names have strict guidelines against being “non-generic” for obvious reasons.

It is widely believed that this application will be denied on these grounds.

The one thing that is a constant, within the realm of the Internet, is that it will never be boring.

This week the actual ownership of the Social Media giant was challenged in court by Paul D. Ceglia, who claims to have financed the original Facebook site for $1000.

In the complaint filed in New York, Mr. Ceglia essentially states that he paid Mr. Zuckerberg $1000 in 2003 to build a website named “TheFacebook”.

The sketchy details alleged that the current owner of “Facebook”, Mr. Zuckerberg, agreed to give Mr.Ceglia 50 percent ownership in the website named “TheFacebook, with an additional one percent of the company for every day that passes beyond January 1, 2004, where the agreed upon website remained unfinished.

The “TheFacebook” site in question was completed on February 4, 2004; this timeframe would give Mr. Ceglia approximately 84% ownership in return for his patience if we adhere to the letter of the supposed agreement.

Will they adhere to that agreement, and what could this mean to Facebook?

The cash that Facebook generates from its advertising pursuits and other forms of revenue have now exceeded the high cost to run the required servers and the many other expenses that are required to keep Facebook up and running, so it is essentially profitable, or “in the black”.

There are many “one-time costs”, as in the $50 million dollar purchase of Friendfeed that continue to chip away at that profitability.  However, investors like Digital Sky Technologies, and their $200 million dollar investment, help to offset these purchases for the future, as well as helping to make possible the public offering of Facebook, rumored to be on the horizon.

Even with investments like this, Facebook is always looking to create new income streams from virtual goods to customized advertisement.

They probably should look into items like these, considering that Facebook has reached the $500 million dollar company level.

Consider that Facebook’s total user base sits at around 300 million and its sign up rate is roughly 806,000 users per day. This rate of growth has also incurred a $100 million in debt financing directly related to server costs.

If the new income streams take hold, these statistics show a viable way to make a lot of money; 50% of Facebook active users log on to Facebook in any given day.
The average Facebook user has 130 friends and is connected to 60 pages, groups and events, and creates approximately 70 pieces of content each month.
More than 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month, and more than 150 million people engage with Facebook on external websites in this same time period.

There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices and those who use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
So to Mr. Ceglia, this could mean a great deal of both money and possible big headaches, if he were to win his lawsuit.

I wouldn’t look for a “under new ownership” sign just yet however, as some have stated that New York’s Statute of limitations could put a quick end to this exercise.

Judge Thomas Brown, who is hearing the case in the New York court, however, has issued a temporary restraining order restricting any transfer of assets by Facebook.

This measure probably has more to do with procedure than actual merit in the lawsuit; considering that  Mr.Zuckerberg created Facebook, and a new company, Facebook, Inc. which is different that “Thefacebook” as the lawsuit names.

To the average person, “thefacebook” and “facebook” is a trivial detail, but to those of us in this industry, even one letter out of place can mean the difference between traffic to your site or traffic to your competitor.

I will be interesting to see how this develops, but I would imagine Mr.Zuckerberg’s Facebook will remain as is when all is said and done.

Recently, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled in favor of an authorized Lexus dealer to use the word “Lexus” as part of its domain nameunder “fair use”.

Previously, this ability to use Lexus was prohibited in an earlier decision.

I have written previously about fair use, but mostly in favor of the trademark holder. This time the decision has benefitted the other side of the argument; not the TM holder, and not those of us in the enforcement industry.

In this case the judge upheld the idea that “Lexus” is being used to literally describe a product or service that is being sold or serviced at the location in question.

To the judge in this case, it was the very definition of fair use.

Lisa and Farzad Tabari, who own Fast Imports, initially lost their domain names; buy-a-lexus.com and buyorleaselexus.com in 2003 under the legal protection against customer confusion, on behalf of Toyota.

Companies have very strict usage policies with regard to how their trademark is used by entities other than the parent company; distributors, jobbers, affiliates and any other related entity must comply, and any variation is monitored and usually forbidden.

The rules must be handed down by the parent company and there needs to be no mistake where this policy is eminating from; the must be strict control of how the mark is used.

Toyota’s basic case centered around the idea that consumers could be confused by the use of the name “Lexus” in the domains in question.

They contend that the website(s) in question contained and used Lexus photos and the Lexus logo, which could only add to the confusion, not clarify.

As expected, Toyota was not sympathetic to the Fast Imports’ use of copyrighted Lexus photos and the Lexus logo, and to the use of Internet domain names buy-a-lexus.com and buyorleaselexus.com.

Initially, the federal court judge ruled in favor of Toyota and the term Lexus was ordered removed; this decision was recently appealed and the result was that domains like “we-are-definitely-not-lexus.com” and “independent-lexus-broker.com” would not confuse a reasonable person into thinking these are legitimate Toyota sites.

In fact, the idea that Lexus was used as a business descriptor was upheld by this judge.

The problem with this decision is that while the judge felt that the previous decision’s protections were too broad, the precedent that was set here could allow for too much protection for cybersquatter technicalities.

We have encountered the situation many times where a cyber-squatter is using a protected brand, and to add insult to injury, they will state “We are not affiliated with “protected brand” and we make no claims of this nature. However they are selling the “protected brand” and many times at a reduced price.

Sometimes, even gray market, stolen, or knock off items are being sold.

In light of this new decision, ridiculous attempts to use a technicality to avoid enforcement, might actually have a chance with another judge using this decision as a precedent.

Personally I disagree with the judgement, because in my mind a trademark requires great responsibility and vigilant effort to keep safe.

Fair use should be reserved for parody and non-money making ventures.

If you want to use a trademark, you should secure permission in advance to do so and pay a fair price for the additional credibility and business you will gain from this recognition.

Essentially, in my opinion, this decision has weakened our protection against cybersquatters, and has empowered both the cheap, and the lazy to forego the correct way to secure business and customers, and instead just encourages infringers to seek out profitable entities and leech off of their success, without paying for it.

Facebook.

The big news is that Lady Gaga passed President Barack Obama with the number of fans on Facebook. In

reaction to hearing this news, Lady Gaga went to Twitter to thank her 4,796,663 Twitter fans for the honor.
However, she then promptly thanked her actual 11,065,406 Facebook friends as well.

President Barack Obama, has approximately 9,999,092 fans on Facebook and pop star Justin Bieber hit 6.7

Million Facebook fans this week. Texas Hold ‘Em Poker has passed 20 million fans, Michael Jackson, even

deceased has over 15 million fans and the game Mafia Wars has also more than10 million fans.

For comparison on the social media site Twitter, Britney Spears is at approximately 5,278,864 followers,

Ashton Kutcher is at approximately 5,204,397 and President Obama is at approximately 4,476,497

followers. Justin Bieber’s Twitter account is now at 3.5 million followers this week and rapidly growing.

However not everyone is a “fan” of social media, or more correctly how it is being used.

Canadian lawyer Tony Merchant has launched a class action lawsuit against Facebook for letting users’

private information to be sold for profit.

Specifically the lawsuit centers around the changing of Facebook’s privacy settings as explained in the 32-

page court papers which were filed in Winnipeg, Canada this week. Mr. Merchant believes that users are

deceived that private information is secure but, it has been claimed by others that the new Facebook

changes has made its users vulnerable to data mining and more advertisements.

Facebook’s privacy changes in question, were made in April, November and December of 2009. According

to these recent claims, this has caused the publicizing of private information and unauthorized sharing of

personal information with third-parties which include software companies and social media applications

like Farmville.

Canada is not alone in its concerns over privacy; Germany’s Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection

and Freedom of Information is asserting that Facebook is storing non-users’ personal data without their

permission.

This claim is around the address book sync feature which uploads data about non-users. The problem is

when Facebook stores this data because a significant portion of these individuals do not belong to

Facebook. This means they have not given permission for Facebook to use or save their private data.

Germany contends this data can contain phone numbers and even e-mail addresses, which they do not

believe that Facebook has a right to use, as it is essentially storing third party data without authorization.

In the wake of this suit, Britain and Switzerland are also reviewing Facebook’s third party data storage

policies.

Also scrutinizing Facebook is Google, but not to sue the social media site; Google wants to kill it.
Google is working on a new social network called “Google Me”.

Google is using YouTube Leanback, to turn YouTube into an all new way of experiencing media and online

networking; The idea is that when logging on, you will see HD video, full-screen,  and as each video ends a

new one starts playing, much like a TV station, only this is based upon data harvested from your

preferences.

This move, they hope, will change the way people view social networks and lure users to Google’s

application.

Google Buzz already allows members to share links, photos, videos; to the careful observer, all of this seems

to point to the idea that Google is staging a takeover.

This may be too little, too late, given that Facebook recently lost 19 percent of its teenage audience to

“Facebook fatigue,” a new disorder gaining popularity where teenagers ditch Facebook.

However, YouTube is the second most popular social network among teens with two in three still using it.

MySpace has lost much of its popularity a while ago with approximately only two in five teens using it.
Twenty two percent of teens have left Myspace, and Twitter, which seems to be geared towards

professionals, was never as popular with teens in the first place
Twitter has only 20 percent of teens using it anyway.

Having said that, teens still spend 80 percent of their online time, or two hours each day on social media

sites.

The social media backlash may be closer than we think.

and some celebrities are looking at purchasing some of these adult themed extensions.

The newly approved .xxx extension which will be managed by the ICM registry, who expects a significant

portion of the new registrations to be defensive ones.

Defensive registrations in the basic definition, are domain name registrations where the entity registering a domain name, is registering the domain with the hope they can block anyone else from registering it first.

This type of registration rarely has unique content and is often parked or is used as a redirect to a site that the owner has content in.

The argument could be made that it sounds like a big waste of money and from a practicality standpoint you  may be right.

However, given the tenacity of cybersquatters and infringers, in many cases a defensive registration is less expensive  and less time consuming than defending your mark in court.

To this end, the management of the ICM Registry is encouraging well known brands and famous people to

apply during the launch period to keep their brands and identities out of the online red-light district.

Far from a philanthropic or humanitarian measure, the act of blocking names will be a significant revenue

generating tactic for ICM, at $60 per .xxx registration. ICM is figuring a $30 million per year take from these

new registrations, and admittedly that figure is speculating that the number of applications for defensive

registration purposes may quite possibly overtake actual registrations.

In addition, they are also counting on the fact that companies will figure that $60 per brand is cheap insurance against filing lawsuits for brand defamation disputes and issues over their brands in the adult name-space.

While seemingly a good strategy, simply defensively registering names is no guarantee of keeping you out of court; especially where adult oriented websites are concerned.

Reference that recently, the parent company of adult content company Exxxotica, filed suit against the adult- industry show “Adultcon” over a 19 domain name infringement issue.

The basis of the complaint is that Exxxotica claims to have registered its name with the U.S. Copyright Office

in 2008, before Adultcon, which registered the names in question on Jan 15th of this year.

Furthermore the suit contends that the 19 domain names are essentially engaging in customer confusion and brand dilution.

The sites in questions are: Exxxotica-lv.com, ExxxoticaExpo-LA.com, ExxxoticaExpo-LV.com,

ExxxoticaExpoLA.com, ExxxoticaExpoLV.com, ExxxoticaLA.com, ExxxoticaLasVegas.com,

ExxxoticaLosAngeles.com, Exxxoticalv.com; ExxxoticaVegas.com; ExoticaExpo-LA.com, ExoticaExpo-LV.com,

ExoticaExpoLA.com, ExoticaExpoLV.com, ExoticaLA.com, ExoticaLosAngeles.com, ExoticaLV.com,

ExoticavaLasVegas.com and ExoticaVegas.com.

These 19 domain names all redirect to Adultcon.com.

The plaintiff is seeking a settlement of approximately $100,000 for each domain name they contend is

squatted. Seemingly, they have calculated these damages as revenue lost due to traffic diversion since the January

registrations.

The adult industry does not have the market cornered on traffic diversion lawsuits however.

Not to be outdone, the University of Texas filed, then lost, its UDRP against Kevin Ham’s Vertical Axis company.

The controversy arose over “TexasSports.org” and the supposed customer confusion issue was centered

around the fact that the University’s owned site is TexasSports.com.

The basic argument centered around the “Texas” word and the University’s owned TM around “Texas”.
Given the fact that TexasSports.com gets over 300,000 visits per month, its not a surprise that they were concerned about TexasSports.org, but they have to let it go at this point.

Their argument was found to not hold merit in the UDRP decision.

TexasSports.mobi anyone? ( HINT: It was still available at the time of this writing)

The internet has finally made its own red light district.
ICANN approved the creation of a .xxx suffix. The design for websites under this extension will be those with pornographic content, as ICANN officials have stated.

The .xxx domain was first proposed in 2005. As expected,  it was rejected immediately, then un-rejected multiple times since inception. However the ICANN announcement means that it will actually become a reality. Unless there are more issues, .xxx will be live in about 9 months. How is that for irony?

ICM Registry Inc. finally got their wish for ICANN to sign off on the .xxx domain. ICM is the company that has been up to bat all these times since 2005, and got rejected over and over until now.

Members of ICANN’s board have argued that in order to maintain neutrality, it should create .xxx and allow websites with sexually explicit content to start using the suffix on a voluntary basis.

The basic idea as I alluded to earlier, is to create a virtual “red light district,” which could be monitored and set to official guidelines. The benefit would be to go to a .xxx site and know that it is safe from viruses or spyware. In addition, it would keep the porn sites in a known area.

Even with this idea of keeping all the “rotten eggs in one basket” there are still opponents of the move, like religious groups and the Free Speech Coalition.
These groups dislike the idea that such an official designation would be given to online porn, despite nearly being on opposite sides of the spectrum.

I have always been of the opinion that having adult sites in one location will make it easier to filter or block access to adult content on their computers. It seems as though this would be a great help for parents.

A few in the adult entertainment industry oppose .xxx, saying it will invite censorship, but then members of religious groups also oppose its creation on obvious moral grounds.

Given that there are an estimated 5 to 6 million adult sites on the World Wide Web, oddly it’s expected that most will have absolutely no interest in moving to the .xxx domain.

Some existing porn sites will surely register xxx versions of their domains, but it seems that this will be in a defensive manner rather than as a new site or a moved site. ICANN expects around half a million .xxx sites will be registered when it finally goes live.

Keep in mind that online pornography is a major industry.  Statistics allude to the fact that $3,000 is spent on Internet porn per second. The math is that there is an estimated 370 million pornographic websites on the Internet. What this adds up to is that .xxx could possibly outpace .com in a perfect storm.  Especially when you factor in that “sex” is the number one search term, globally. “Sex” accounts for 25 percent of all Internet searches.

ICM said it already has 110,000 pre-reservations for .xxx domains, which would possibly cost $60 a year to register.

Less known, but approved today also, is the ICANN decision for domain names written entirely in Chinese characters. This includes the final characters to the right of the last dot where previously, you could have all Chinese characters except for the “.cn”. Now you can even have the “.cn” in Chinese characters.

Now if only someone would tell the .cn registry to allow registrations again.

The basic explanation of how Caffeine works, is that it processes hundreds of thousands of Web pages in parallel and updates these results more regularly on a global scale. Google Research head, Peter Norvig was quoted as saying the company was updating its index every ten seconds now.

This represents a change from collecting big “batches” of Web pages to index for its search, instead Google is publishing more frequently, somewhat in real time; it processes the web in bits and pieces instead.

This means that new Web pages or newly added information on existing Web pages are added to Google almost immediately. This has resulted in Caffeine making Google searches faster than Yahoo or Bing at present.

This doesn’t mean Google changed its search formula beyond the Mayday algorithm update. These changes also will not make Google search results populate any faster; all that really changed is that Google has made it easier for you to find new content, and find that content more quickly.

Social media is set to benefit most from this update.

In the past, any new posts that normally would have been missing from search results, because Google wouldn’t have found and indexed it yet, are now visible. These same posts will be found in Google search results more quickly with Caffeine.

So in the wake of these changes, let’s talk percentages:

Caffiene claims to index new information 50 percent faster than Google’s old search queries.

Caffeine adds new information to the index at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day, and takes up nearly 100 million GB of storage in one database.

Google is still the top search engine, with 64 percent of search queries, but that’s down 1 percent compared to last month.
Microsoft and Yahoo! combined now make up about 30 percent of the search market.

This is not to say that Bing and Yahoo are out.
Microsoft in May made major increases in four major categories. Some believe this is due to the company’s focus on verticals., but the results are indisputable;
Searches on Bing related to automotive, health, shopping, and travel all increased by 95%, 105%, 100%, and 71%,  compared to this month last year.

This demonstrates a desire to compete and based upon these changes, Bing is also doing something right.

Back to Google, what does it take to orchestrate a change of this magnitude? Executives at Google are reluctant to release any specific details with regard to how or what they changed but they have released some interesting analogies:

Rough calculations suggest that you would need 1,562,500 ipads, that would stretch for 235.75 miles or 625,000 of the largest iPods stacked end-to-end which would go for more than 40 miles to equal the new storage it requires to make Caffiene effective.

Thats a lot of electronics.

Aside from the Apple comparison, it will be interesting to see what Bing and Yahoo do in response to preserve or gain market share.

Perhaps, if you hit refresh in Google, Caffiene may already have the answer.

Each year, Google changes its algorithm anywhere from 350 to 500 times and if you are too narrow in your optimizations you will be at the mercy of each revision, and may find your rankings drop.

Specifically, if you check your search referral traffic between April 28th and May 3rd you may find that there was a drop in the number of referrals, pages getting traffic, etc,  due to the “Mayday” change, but any drops in traffic to your big terms are most likely unrelated. Search referrals (long tail traffic) is where you should look for change.

If you monitor your rankings for a handful of obscure tail terms, you may notice that your rankings suddenly dropped and indexation or crawl statistics suddenly changed.

There is much speculation about what elements of the algorithm were tweaked; to many that Google may have reduced the size and depth of the primary index and possibly broad link devaluation, and/or a shift in how phrase match is performed, increased bias may now be given to authority/brand sites, and many other unsubstantiated theories.

In reality, Google has been looking to achieve a few fundamental things with their search engine: Improve speed of results, improve relevance, and increase the amount of time users spend on Google.

Google has also been trying to ensure that brands are being found first for their own goods and products; if you have your keywords and searches better engineered to sell products than the actual manufacturer, you may have seen a drop in results after Google’s tweaking.

Regardless of what elements that Google changed, if you create unique, relevant and comprehensive product descriptions and search terms instead of simply using generic terms, you could save yourself current and future traffic loss.  This is a strategy that we advise and implement for our clients at Metamend. Hopefully, your service provider has prepared you accordingly.

Amazingly, a heavy keyword count is not the fix you are looking for; review your link structure and content, make site-wide changes for the benefit of the Googlebot, and give attention to who overtook you in ranking.

Avoid spam and purchased links as a quick fix, and instead focus on what the competition is doing different from you and work on building your page strength.

Does this mean you should forget about Search Engine Optimization? Absolutely not!

In fact, the opposite is true; Search Engine Optimization is more important than ever. Industry professionals can guide you in making quicker and more relevant changes to your site and rebuild or maintain your ranking in a more timely manner.

Bing handles real-time search results separately from normal search results and segregated these results into their own search page. Real-time search results seem to be the popular method, and by segregating results, it appears that Bing may have known something the rest of the Search Engine Optimization world did not.

In Bing, real-time search results are not displayed in the regular listings but if you are looking for information of this kind you can find it. So as a result, Twitter results are sectioned off in Bing.

As Twitter increasingly plays a more important role in search engine optimization, Google and Bing will increase its’ incorporation into search results.

Bing’s handling of these results currently seem to be the most beneficial from a search engine optimization standpoint.

Does this mean that Google is ineffective for search engine optimization uses? Absolutely not.

Here are some things to consider when setting up your Google presence.

Google local listing has become of increased importance in search engine optimization; for a small business trying to attract local customers, Google utilizes a local map with local results prior to the organic listings loading.

Businesses as a whole, seem to be overlooking ways to improve these listings from a search engine optimization standpoint.

Here is how to get started:
First and most obviously, fill out the necessary start up data requested by Google.

Google allows 200 words to describe your business. Please use as much or all of these words and include keywords and high detail.

Use your main keyword in the title. Aside from the obvious, it will make the rest of the text that I will illustrate below, flow and appear to fit better.

Resist the urge to load the description with nothing but keywords and unengaging text; This is your chance to benefit from organic traffic and use some marketing to your advantage; belive it or not, this is the best search engine optimization that you can do here.

Create a listing for each physical location, and use the local phone number whenever possible. This keeps everything organic, useful and multiplies your online presence to match your physical one.

Google provides for 5 category listings for your business. Make sure to use all five to your advantage.

Perhaps use one for each facet of your business? This will allow you a much larger search engine optimization footprint and hopefully reach more customers.

Create one insightful article a day with well-written content pertaining to your business.

Appropriate back-link and keyword usage will drive traffic, customers, and industry attention to your site.

This is especially effective search engine optimization technique for new business trying to make a name.

Be careful not to bore the readers with “how great I am and my business is better than yours” articles.

Keep the content intriguing and give the reader something that they can use or give them the feeling they got something they should be paying for, for free.

If you would like more search engine optimization help, Metamend has industry professionals that can give you the advantage.

While it is not dead, many people use back-linking incorrectly and this may account for the incorrect perception.

For example: using spamming techniques and purchasing links will get you either penalized or banned from search engines. To many, this is how they understand back-linking, and that methodology would negate any possible benefit.

In most cases, it can be a recipe for disaster.

Consider what would happen if instead of that, you effectively used a social media build, replete with back links, utilized a news feed and possibly submitted articles carefully written with an eye on beneficial keywording, to a number of new oriented websites?

You could see your efforts rewarded beyond your expectations.

Keep in mind as well, that all SEO methods use link building to establish a website’s authority.
Relevance in key-wording and back-linking is not only instrumental, it is mandatory.

Aside from the obvious traffic increase is also the potential increase in realized sales. The down side is that backlink quantity will not guarantee results; your efforts must be done with skill to make them appear organic.

Broken and irrelevant linking will be taken into account by the search engine when calculating your rank. Using link-exchanges is one way to legitimately build your back-links but this must be done very carefully. Most purchased link programs are either fraudulent or work counter to to your goals.

These can be, and usually are replete with dead links.

Also, the habit of  posting to every site you come across, will not accomplish your ends. This will usually result in the opposite result, and using anchor text that does not match your keywords, andis another common mistake that erases any possible benefit.

Many people may have their back-linking figured out from an implementation standpoint, but they never monitor nor maintain them after that; suddenly all benefit is either negated or is possibly helping someone else out.  Broken links, improper or no use of 301 redirects, using websites with page rankings of only 0,1 or 2 will adversely impact your efforts as well.

After that, is it any wonder that someone who has hundreds of back-links going nowhere, sees the guy with only three back-links to high page ranked sites and correctly configured 301s, getting all the traffic and incorrectly makes the assumption that back-links are meaningless.

He is thinking; “How can he have all that traffic with 3 links and I have hundreds and my ranking is going nowhere?”

Consider that at the end of the day, after all of the correct tweaking and back-linking, the greatest single benefit is regular, quality content that matches your linking efforts. Great content combined with great back-links, will show you the single greatest return for your efforts.

Usually, the problem is that the very people doing it wrong, can have blogs like this and may be prolific writers. Their writings maybe incorrect, their advice convoluted, but they could have a decent sized reader base with someone else linking to this content with a correct back-linking campaign. This is how the incorrect perception spreads, even becoming viral.

At Metamend, we have industry professionals to assist you with your own back-linking and content, to get the traffic looking for you to your site.