Pennies for Wink Publishing

What are second tier backlinks?

These are links pointing to your backlinks. The RSS feeds that I have recommended provide second tier backlinks.

Why should I have second tier backlinks?

A backlink is only of value to you if it is indexed. You produce articles and have them distributed to get backlinks. This is great in theory and does work, but not all content on all sites is indexed. A second tier backlink can improve the chance that your content is indexed and provide you with the backlink that you have worked to get.

How can I get second tier backlinks?

There are many ways to get second tier backlinks both by manual means and by using various tools. Social bookmarking is a good way to get a second tier backlink. You can do this manually or you can use a social submitter tool. I am looking into putting a bookmarking button on your article pages that will help you or your readers to bookmark the page. I will probably set up a social bookmarking site in the near future, watch for an announcement.

You have an author RSS feed available through your profile page. Pinging the RSS feed whenever you get an article acceptance email is quick and easy. You can also submit your feed to RSS aggregator sites. The quick and easy way to do this is by using the RSS submitter tool available as a free service to members of the IMTalk SEO Forum. The tool will build pages on 5 RSS aggregator sites. These pages will pull your RSS feed so any time that a new article is published it will show up on these pages. This is a set and forget operation and is worth the few minutes that it will take to set it up.

The Admin at the IMTalk forum has just released a new service. This is available to members through a credit system. It is not a free tool, but the design and implementation make it a good value in my opinion. There is an introductory price offered at the present time. I suggest that you look over the offer page at:  http://www.imtalk.org/cmps_index.php?pageid=IMT-Supercharged-Bookmarks This is not a long sales letter filled with hype. It is a description of the tool and what it can do for you.

I have been a member of this forum for several months and have used all of the available tools. I was invited to beta test the SuperCharged BookMarks tool. While there has not been enough time to fully evaluate the results, the early information looks very promising. I submitted a site on the fast track 24 hour submission schedule. Two days later I did a search for the site url in Google. I found listings of three of the submission sites in positions 21, 22, and 23 out of over 39,000 results. This proves that the sites are getting crawled and indexed rapidly.

There is a rapidly growing thread in the forum announcing the tool. The reviews by those who participated in the beta testing are listed there as well as general questions and comments. If you are interested in further information the thread would be a good read:  http://www.imtalk.org/f42/1589-imt-supercharged-bookmarks-boost-your-backlinks-rankings-sales-|-low-%240-01-per-backlink.html

Do you have any other suggestions or comments on the topic of second tier backlinks? Leave a comment!

There was a second quick update to Akismet, and now All-In-One-SEO has been updated. I have too many WP blogs!! I need to visit many of them anyway, so this will only take an extra few minutes of my time.

I am also doing beta testing of a new bookmarking solution. I will let you know the results. If it lives up to its expectations I will feel confident in recommending it to you.

Update: This is the first time that I recall that AIOS has pushed out an update that did not require that you re-enable the plugin after the update. I suspect that the reason for that was to walk you past the donate button one more time. I did not think that it was a particularly friendly approach, but I do believe that developers should get paid.

Do you have a WordPress blog? WordPress pushed out their latest update last night. Following close on its heels is an update for Akismet, the useful anti-spam plugin that comes bundled with WP.

It is always a good idea to update to the latest version whenever there is an update available. The new version number for WordPress is 3.0.5. If you are running an earlier version you really should update. WordPress updates often offer improved security as well as any bug fixes that are needed.

It is not uncommon for updates to your plugins to be released when there is a WP update. If you have not updated WP already, after you do the update click on your plugins icon and check for updates. Either the update will be listed under Akismet or there will be a notification that an update is available in the line at the top of the page. Other plugins may be updated soon, but I feel that it is important to do the update to WP and then update the plugins if necessary, rather than waiting for the dust to clear.

Have you done the update, yet??

There is a new tool available from the IMTalk forum. I discussed this in my previous post, but now I have implemented this for my feeds and suggest that you submit your author feed using this tool.

This can greatly enhance your article marketing efforts. You are paying for article submission services one way or another. Article marketing is a proven way to produce quality backlinks to your sites. But getting your articles published is not enough. Your articles must be indexed in order for those backlinks to count. To be sure that your articles are indexed they need some backlinks as well. The RSS Submitter is a painless way to get some backlinks to your articles.

IMT RSS Submitter
This tool will submit your RSS Feed to my private network of RSS Directories/Aggregators, then it will ping each created page to 33 ping services*, which will result in many backlinks towards your URLs (web pages, blog posts, backlinks, etc.).

How To Use the Tool

This tool is provided free of charge to Nemanja’s forum members, so you will need to register for the forum to use the tool. Once registered the tool is very easy to use. You will need your RSS feed to submit. Provide a title for your feed and select an appropriate category, then hit the submit button. There is a button to test your feed, use that before you submit your feed to be sure that there are no problems with your feed.

To get your feed URL go to your author profile page on the directory. An easy way to get there is to click on your Author name on any of your articles on the site (links to your articles are included with the article accepted emails). On your profile page is a listing of your articles and an RSS feed icon and link to subscribe to your feed. Click on the icon or link and your feed page will open. Copy the URL from your browser address bar.

You can submit any feed that you have. I went through my article sites and blogs and picked up the RSS feed links. I then copied them to a notepad page. Then I went to the submitter and submitted each of them. If you have a blog or forum they will have an RSS feed available. I suggest collecting all of your RSS feeds and submitting them.

Why Should I Do This?

This tool establishes a feed page on up to 5 RSS aggregators or directories around the Internet. It then pings the existence of these pages to 33 services to be sure that they are noticed. On the created pages your articles will be listed with their URLs from your RSS feed. The search engines spider these sites regularly. This exponentially increases the chance that your article will be indexed and your backlink will be noted. The pages contain your RSS feed, so any time that an article is added to your feed it is listed on these sites. You only need to submit your feeds one time and the pages will continue to work for you as you submit new content for distribution.

This Internet Marketing and SEO Forum is relatively young, but already there is much good information available there. There are also a couple of other tools available and more to come. Membership may be of value to you in your Internet Marketing efforts. Getting full value from your Article Marketing efforts is certainly worth a few minutes of your time.

There is a relatively new Internet Marketing and SEO forum that you may wish to check out. It is the IMTalk.ORG forum.

The Admin there, Nemanja, has developed some tools and offers them to the members of the forum. He has just released his third tool today.

The website submitter submits to various sites. The purpose of the tool is to get a new or updated website some bot attention. There are over 2,500 sites to which your url is submitted. Some have reported very heavy bot traffic to their sites soon after submitting a url. This is a completely automated tool and is available to all visitors to the forum.

The second tool is for members of the forum only. It is a directory submission tool. There are over 2000 directories in this tool. As much as possible it is automated, but there is some work involved as well. This tool has the potential to produce some directory backlinks. It is probably worth the effort to submit because it adds diversity to a linking campaign. This process takes some time, and many of the directories do check the links instead of auto approving them. For directories with a Captcha the tool retrieves the Captcha and you fill it in to complete the registration. You should also check the category as the auto selected category is not always the best.

Today Nemanja released his third tool. This is an RSS submitter. This one has a good deal of potential to build backlinks through RSS feeds. You can also build a feed for static sites or other backlinks using a service such as IceRocket and then submit that feed through the submitter tool.

Soon to be released is a social network submitter tool, and a tool that will not be completely free, a blog network.

There are now over 4,600 members and the numbers are growing. The quality of the members seems to be improving as well as the word gets out to the community. I suggest that you check out IMTalk!

SiteMaps have now been submitted to Google for all of my active article directories. The general directory, InformationPlease, has over 18,500 articles listed in the site map. I am looking in to submitting them to Bing and Yahoo as well.

InformationPlease was created on new sub-domain space. I have seen GoogleBot active on the site whenever I look at the server logs, but there are not too many articles indexed at this time. I am hoping that the sitemap will improve the situation. The niche directories are attached to sites that have been active for some time. They may be in slightly better shape, but still could use a boost.

I have a good deal of work to do to promote these sites. Many of the articles that are now indexed were mentioned on social media sites. I saw a case were someone listed a link to an article on Craig’s list and in less than 12 hours it was listed in Google’s index. Taking a few minutes to promote your articles on these sites can pay off for you and for the community. If your article is not indexed your links have no value. If the directory gains importance there will be more link juice for all.

I have been pinging the site feeds through the Ping-O-Matic service for the past couple of weeks. With Ping-O-Matic it only takes a couple of minutes to set up and then to reping your feed it is only a matter of clicking a bookmark for the ping page. Pinging your feed alerts the services to the fact that new material has been added to the feed.  If you have a good title you may catch an occasional human visitor, but the real value is getting your content in front of the search bots. It is possible that your content may be indexed faster if you ping your feed whenever new content is added.

My directories are set to send an email when your article is published on one of the sites. If your articles are published on several of my sites it would be best to set up a separate ping for each feed. I chose to use Ping-O-Matic but there are other services available that ping even more sites. PinGoat and Pingler are two other services with which I am familiar.

The directory script builds an individual feed for each author as well as the main site RSS feed. I ping the main site feed whenever I add content. You would want to ping your author feed when you receive an article acceptance email. To obtain your feed url, click on the article link in the email. When your article opens on the site click on your author name. This will take you to your profile page. Under your profile is a list of your articles in the directory. Right under the heading, before the first article, is an RSS icon. Click on the RSS icon and copy the URL from your browser address bar. (You could also right click on the icon and choose copy link location.) This is your feed URL.

Ping-O-Matic has three entry boxes to fill out: Site Name, Site URL, and Feed URL. Their form has a list of sites that they will ping. The left of the form lists common services with an option to check all. With the information at the top filled in click the check all for the common services and then click on the Ping bar at the bottom of the form. When the ping page comes up bookmark it. The next time that you want to ping your feed just open that page from your bookmark. You will not need to enter the information again if you have saved your ping  page.

PinGoat works much the same way and requests the same information. I don’t know if you can bookmark the page for future pings, but whenever I open the page the last information that I entered is there. If you are just dealing with one site this would be fine. You may need to re-enter information each time if your articles are submitted to more than one directory.

Pingler only has two entry boxes and a category dropdown. You would put your feed URL in the url box. Many of the sites that they ping require that the URL is a feed URL. A few on their list will accept a site url. You would need to fill out the information each time you visit, so it would be best to bookmark your feed url and open it in another tab.

Depending on the volume of your submissions you may want to schedule pinging once or twice a week, although it would not hurt to ping whenever you know that content has been added to your feed. Once it is set up it only takes seconds to submit your feed. If your content gets indexed faster it is worth the time, and if you should get direct traffic from this it would be a bonus.

Some time ago I had recommended to my authors that they use social bookmarking to call attention to their posts. I have seen some results in my analytics reports that prove that this works. Most of the traffic that I had seen was coming from FaceBook, but there were occasional visitors that came from other social bookmarking services.

This morning I noticed a bump in the traffic to one of the article directories. I went to the server log to see if there was an indication of the reason for this. I found that the traffic was coming from a post on the Washington, D.C. Craig’s List. Author Ed O. or an interested third party had posted a link to an article in the personals section of the list. Several visitors had followed the link to the article.

The real news came when I looked to Google! I first searched for the article title. The article was not listed as being on my site. I then did the Google ‘site:’ search and found that the article was listed. This was less than 12 hours after the post to Craig’s list. This site has few pages listed under the site search. The fact that this article is listed proves the power of Craig’s List.

This appears to be an effective way to get your articles indexed. It is not enough to just write an article and toss it into the wind. Getting the article indexed means that your backlink is also indexed. With just a few minutes of work posting to social bookmarking sites or, perhaps better, Craig’s List you can increase the value of the content that you have submitted to various sites.

I have begun a program of pinging the directory feed each time that the directory is updated. I am using Ping-O-Matic for my pinging service. Ping-O-Matic saves a page for the ping and to reping the feed all I need to do is open the page.

It does appear that there is a bit more bot activity on the sites. The directory traffic has also been improving so there may be some direct benefit from the pinging program. I am hoping that with frequent reminders I will begin to see better indexing of the content on these directories.

An author on one of my directories pointed out to me that I had no xml site map. I knew this was the case, but manually building site maps for frequently updated article directories is beyond my capabilities. The directory in question has around 18,500 articles and adds around 100 articles a day via the SubmitYourArticle subscription service.

I checked the forum for the article CMS that I am using and found a script to automate the site map building. I tested the script and it worked fine. Other posters had offered some improvements and I intend to check those out as well. I can do a manual call for an update as it is, but that job can be automated. There is also a hint of a method to g-zip the sitemap and that may be of value. I have a bit more testing to do.

When everything is fully operational I will submit my new sitemaps to the major search engines. This should help with getting the pages and articles indexed. It will be a beautiful thing for all of us!

Thanks, Josh!