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How to Profit from Blogging & Marketing Online

LinkPatrol Review: Find, Fix and Get Rid of Unwanted Outbound Links

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Do you have an old website with hundreds or thousands of articles and external links ?

Is your site affected by Google’s Penguin?

Are you worried that your website contains links passing critical link juice to bad or spammy sites?

If you, like me, have scoured the web for free plugins, or cheap web services to help you clean up your external links, and FAILED, here’s a tool that is so brilliant, it will have you managing all your links in no time at all.

The tool is called LinkPatrol and it has been developed and published by Search Engine Journal, experts in the field of search engine marketing.

In this post, I’ll show you how the plugin works and how it has helped clean up bad links on one of my sites.

To understand the importance of LinkPatrol, we must first understand how outbound links affect our website performance. Let’s dig in.

Issues Caused by Outbound Links

Outbound links can create SEO trouble for you in a number of ways.

Passing Link Juice

When your website links to an external site, you are passing on some of your website’s SEO value (or link juice) to them.

You obviously won’t link to a bad or spammy website deliberately, but you have no control over that website’s content either.

That leaves room for several problems. Since your linking, the webmaster of that site may have modified or removed that content, sold the website to someone who is now engaging in dubious practices, or the domain may have simply expired, leaving you with one or more bad links.

You’ll be surprised how many links on your site get caught up in these scenarios.

Poor User Experience

It often happens that website owners change their permalink structure or move their content to a different location. If you have linked to one of those articles, your website readers will end up looking at a 404 page.

This creates a bad user experience for your visitors and you may lose credibility if you have many such links going out.

Google Keyword Penalties

If you have allowed guest posting in the past, chances are, many of those articles contain generic keywords or money keywords within.

Google’s Penguin algo has penalized thousands of websites that have entertained such type of anchor text links in their articles. If you have accommodated such type of content, expect nothing less than a harsh dressing down from the G monster.

Outdated Content

Another problem with outbound links is that they may sometimes direct your website readers to information that is old and outdated. This is obviously going to offer another poor experience for your readers.

Banish External Link Demons Forever

The best way to deal with one or more of these issues is to know what links are flowing out of your site. LinkPatrol helps you unravel the complicated mess that is external linking.

What is LinkPatrol?

  • LinkPatrol is a WordPress plugin that does an in-depth analysis of your website and:
  • Extracts all external links in your posts and pages
  • Publishes a report on your link statistics by domain, author, internal vs. external links, and links per post
  • Lets you nofollow or strip links using one click action
  • Continues to scan and monitor your external links

What LinkPatrol Does NOT Do

LinkPatrol does not:

  • Automatically identify the 404, broken, or spammy links
  • Make recommendations on what links must be removed from your site
  • Automatically fix bad links

How to Monitor and Manage External Links with LinkPatrol

Now that you’ve got a basic idea of what LinkPatrol can do for you, here’s how it works.

  1. Buy LinkPatrol from this website.
  2. Install the plugin by uploading the file to the plugins page of your WordPress dashboard.
  3. Go to LinkPatrol->Scanner.
  4. Hit the Start Scan button to get LinkPatrol to start scanning your website. You only need to scan your website once. LinkPatrol will automatically scan and monitor all future links that are published in your posts.
  5. Next head over to LinkPatrol->Reports. The Reports page contains 4 tabbed pages.

Reports dashboard: Displays an overview of the link stats. It shows you how many posts were scanned, how many links were found, and how many links there are per post.

You’ll also see a section with a bar chart depicting most linked to domains, authors with most links per post, a pie chart showing you the distribution of internal and external links as well as the external links per post.

linkpatrol reports

 

Domain Reports: This tab, which is the most important one you need to focus on displays a report of the number of posts linking to each domain, the number of links pointing to each domain, the number of authors who have written posts linking to those domains, and a couple of check boxes to strip or no follow the domains.

domain report in linkpatrol

 

Author Reports: This page lists all the author names, their contributions, and links per post in each of their contributions.

Keyword Search: If you need to do a quick keyword search, this page offers a search box to find posts with specific anchor text.

6. Go to the Domain Reports dashboard. Examine each domain your website is linking to. Right-click the links hyperlink to evaluate the post. Examine the post title, the external link and the anchor text. If you think that a post should not be linking to that domain, or a no-follow link will suffice, check the appropriate checkbox and click Update.

That’s it!

How LinkPatrol Helped me Overcome Google Manual Spam Penalty

When Google let loose its Panda and Penguin updates, my tech blog (http://theapptimes.com) took a hit. The 4 year old blog has over 2500 posts.

In previous years, I had accepted many guest posts from contributors around the world, and authored plenty more. When Google webmaster slapped my website with a manual spam action for unnatural links, I had to scramble to identify the sites I was linking to.

unnatural outbound links

 

As you can imagine, there was no single tool that could pull that sort of data, at an affordable price. The result? I had to manually open up each article and do an evaluation.

It looked like I would be fixing the problem for at least the next 6 months – IF I WORKED LIKE A MAD DOG THAT IS!

It so happened that during my searches, I stumbled upon a post on Search Engine Journal explaining a similar situation they found themselves in and how they came up with a plugin to solve the problem.

I decided to give it a go and save myself from the link purging insanity that I was currently trapped in.

LinkPatrol turned out to be a revelation.

One of the first things that took me by surprise when I activated and hit the Scan button was that the plugin analyzed all my posts and identified that I had over 14500 links, that’s over 6 links per post in just a few seconds.

Yep! In JUST A FEW SECONDS! There was no time lag, performance hits, slowdowns or anything of the sort.

The plugin gave me a very good overall and in-depth domain and author-wise link history of all my 2500+ posts.

This enabled me to focus on my grueling task ahead. I was able to easily overlook posts that linked to good, authoritative domains and focused my attention on the not-so-familiar dubious ones. (As for the 404s, I had Broken Link Checker to handle them.)

This was still a manual task, but now I could quickly right-click a link to see what the post was about, what I was linking to, and the anchor text of that link. With this structured approach I was able to evaluate all my external links, all 14500 of them in just under 2 weeks.

I wasn’t slogging over the data for hours. I was able to organize all my blogging tasks during the day, while spending a couple of hours to clear up the external links. This way, I continued to focus on blogging while still fixing my outbound link issue.

Thanks to LinkPatrol, I was able to complete my fixes within a reasonable time and clear the manual spam action on my blog. Now I’m back to focusing on other aspects of my business.

If you are struggling to make sense of your external links, give LinkPatrol a go. I guarantee it will save you hours of painstaking work.

Download LinkPatrol Now

LinkPatrol – Pros

  • Light-weight plugin
  • Super fast analysis of your link data
  • Clean dashboard showing you a history of your outbound links
  • One click options to strip off or no follow links
  • Ability to export data as CSV
  • No need to backup the database, and should you make a mistake (in no-following or striping a URL), fixing is just a matter of unchecking the error.

LinkPatrol – Misses

  • LinkPatrol does not let you see if links are broken, which would be extremely helpful. If you were linking to a good domain that has since gone 404, you could easily overlook it when using the plugin. This forces you to place your reliance on another plugin.
  • Future versions are expected to support comment scanning, but for now the plugin EXCLUDES links in comments.
  • Pricing could a little steep for small bloggers.

LinkPatrol is Recommended For:

  • Anyone who is running a big blog or website, say over 2 years and over or with over 500 posts
  • Blogs that support guest authors or multi author blogs
  • Blogs that have been affected by Google’s Penguin algo

LinkPatrol Pricing

Remember, investing in the right business assets is essential if you want your blog to grow and beat your competitors. If you choose to go with LinkPatrol, you can choose from one of three plans.

Blogger: Perfect for individuals running a single blog. Cost: $50 for a single site license. You get one year of support and updates for free during this time.

Consultant: Perfect for managing up to 5 sites. Cost: $100. Free support and updates for one year.

Agency: Perfect if you are running a small SEO agency. Cost: $200.Free support and updates for one year.

Are you ready to take control of your website’s external links?

linkpatrol-pricing

 

Say goodbye to your external link cleaning woes!

Download LinkPatrol Now (aff link)

4 Simple List Building Tips to Improve Your Blog Conversion Rate

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Bloggers and businesses alike are constantly looking at gaining new clients be it from offline business or from the web.

With the online marketing boom, businesses are constantly trying to figure out what is it really they need to do to get more clients than their competitors.

While businesses and bloggers try to understand the blogging and social media. I would like to share with you some of the many ways that you can optimize your blog and convert better.

Before considering about blog conversion, I would suggest you begin marketing your blog for improved reach and also may be a little bit of design tweaks to optimize it.

If you are not into design or the technical side of your website you can always hire a developer to help you out.

Blogs are the pinnacle of traffic generation and growing your business.

If you have an online or offline business its imperative that you manage a blog to draw in potential customers.

I’ve been able to do it for the last 8 years and continue to generate leads and new customers.

These four simple tips have help me boost my blog conversion rate by about 73% and I’m sure that you can do that too.
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5 Facebook Engagement Tips to Garner Customer Relationship

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Facebook has been one of the largest sources of traffic to my blog.

I get an average 10000 visitors from Facebook.

Google analytics does a good job of providing referral traffic information.

Its quite interesting that a social network with a few hundred followers on a fan page and a few good people in your network can help generate such volume of visitors.

Massive Visitors = Re-shares + Likes + Engagement

In order to drive traffic from Facebook to your blog and grow your business gradually, build an effective and highly engaging community of followers and fans on Facebook.

Facebook is the largest social network that can drive massive traffic towards your blog. Traffic that you can qualify at your blog and convert them into potential customers.
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5 Tweet Writing Tips to Increase Click Through Rate

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The power of Twitter has been the most rewarding for bloggers in terms of driving Twitter Traffic and networking with peers.

An easier form of communication, one would say.

Twitter is a medium to create awareness for some, generate traffic for many and simply a tool to engage with like minded folks.

Social Media has been a blessing to online marketers as it makes it easy to take their content, products directly to customers world wide sitting at the comfort of their homes.

There is a lot one can do to market on social media like Facebook and Twitter. Here are a few tricks that will help you to get the most out twitter.

This post is more about how to write tweets to get the maximum clicks and Traffic.

If you can’t write well, or have a well designed blog or website the user will leave the moment they visit therefore increasing your blog bounce rate – which is bad for your blog SEO.

So before yous start marketing on sites like Twitter, make sure you have a well branded blog.

Once you are confident that the user can benefit from your blog, then its time to start practicing writing your tweets.

One method I usually follow is to open up an excel workbook, if you are on Mac or you can even use Google docs.

Take up one of your recent blog posts and try writing at least 5 variations of your tweet.

While doing that try to follow the following tips as much as you possibly can. Sometimes its not possible to apply all the tips into a tweet, but you sure can add some.

Lets get started to writing better tweets, tweets that gets clicks.
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How to Write Compelling Product Reviews that Increase Affiliate Earnings

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Doing product reviews on blogs is a big deal these days.

Why, cause most reviewers don’t really have the product on hand when they write the review.

This is a major drawback is because most bloggers don’t really know about the product and are not equipped to write compelling review.

This results in poor quality because all these reviews have is the features, price structure and other basic material that is available on the official product pages.

Product pricing and features are good to know, but readers search for reviews because they are looking for personal experience with the product.

With affiliate marketing growing bigger than ever each year, if bloggers are going to sell anything they need to write some reviews from a user perspective.

The purpose of the review is not to sell, but to tell the readers who the product helped you and how you saved money or how it help your business grow.

Reviewers these days constantly keep pitching the product hoping readers would buy, it might work but it does not help with your reputation.

Once the reader knows that the product is not worth it, he will never again trust your reviews.

And that is something we bloggers never want to happen. We want returning customers.
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6 Tips To Build Your Online Blog Network From Eddie Gear

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Even a blogger needs support and often the person he/she turns to is someone in their network.

Networking is important, and we will need the help of people in our network at some point in our career as bloggers.

You might be in a dilemma or contemplation as to whom you should network with and why, when and how. Its really a matter of preference and choice.

Who ever you choose to network with remember its not just meeting new people and growing your business but its about mutual respect and trust for one another.

If you are really looking to become a successful blogger you better network and have connections cause you will need them. The ride to the top of the hill can be a struggle and your definitely going to need support.

Its good to networks with like minded people, but always know to differentiate between connections and competition.

People would not mind pulling you down to grow ahead of you, especially if you are a threat to their business success. In this article I will list out a few genuine networking tips from a blogger, myself.

While this article is not a networking for dummies, It will cover the basics and the networking skills that are required. Apart from these tips be sure to use Social Media to boost your connections.
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