Internet Marketing 101 for the Merrimack Valley Chapter of SCORE
May 9, 2012 by: Moser, James

James Moser of Cairn Applications gave a presentation to the Merrimack Valley Chapter of SCORE ( the Senior Corps of Retired Executives) this morning entitled Internet Marketing 101.  

The presentaion goes through the process of making your way out on to the web, and highlights a number of issues for the uninnitiated.  The presentation is reproduced here.

Many thanks to SCORE for the this opportunity!

Value of Back Links
Nov 15, 2011 by: Moser, James

It's funny, I must get a dozen comments,and twice that many emails every week telling me that I would have more traffic if I would just let xrumerservice place spam back links on a million other blogs every week.  Let's look at what they are really selling. 

A back link is a link on another site that  points "back" to your site. A back link extends the credibility of one site to another.  If the search engine views a site as an authoritative source on a given subject and your site related to that subject, then a link from the first site to back your site extends their credibility to you. That's a win!

If, for example, you own a business as a web developer in Nashua, NH then it makes good sense to have a back link on all of your clients indicating that you are the web developer for that site.  Additionally it would make good sense to have a link on the Nashua Chamber of Commerce ( if you are a member, which Cairn Applications is ).  The link  on the COC makes sense because you are a business that is associated with that  chamber.

But these are not what xrummer is selling.  What xrummer sells is a link on an enormous number of blog sites that are in no way related to your site.  They have written a program that trolls the internet looking for sites that accept random comments. They are hoping to ( and do ) find sites that accept comments without moderation and dump spam comments on them that include links to your site.   Ask yourself, are the readers of piglust.com ( some cyber-squatter actually owns that - unreal ) really the customers that you are trying to connect with?  Of course not. 

For xrummer, it's simply a numbers game.  Will a certain number of readers on piglust.com click any link they see n their endless pursuit of naughty entertainment?  Of course.  Will this behaviour increase the traffic on your site.  Sure.  Will it increase your sales?  Not a chance. What it will do is burn up your bandwidth and increase your bounce rate. I'll pass on that.

Back links are only valuable if they come from a reputable site that has authority and credibility in a subject area that is related to your site.

So, xrumer ( and colleagues of which there are many ) go ahead and send the emails, they go right to the trash folder.  Keep posting comments, they all get deleted.