| LED Digest 2373: Three Way Linking |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom www.GetWebContent.com/LED : the LED's Key Sponsor The Web's Most Experienced SEO Content Providers. ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. March 22, 2007 Issue no. 2373 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== When Clients Don't Pay ==-- ~ Ron Rizzi "...a handshake and trust may work for you but it does not work in today's world." ~ Marty R. Milette "So far, my most frequent non-paying clients have been from Australia..." --== 3rd Party Reciprocal Links ==-- ~ Joel Lesser "Make linking decisions for your end users." ~ Charlie Rufus "Google will degrade your site ranking if you engage in link swapping." ~ Dirk Johnson "Here's the deal with three-way linking..." --== HTML Standards and Search Rankings ==-- ~ Michael Linehan "...please don't anyone use classes instead of heading elements." ~ Al Toman "I cannot find any authority on this, just speculation." ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Ron Rizzi Subject: Bamboozled > This company has received the promised deliveries from > [their designer] and he's getting stonewalled. No answers > to voicemails or emails. Nothing. He hasn't been paid. > Has this ever happened to you? - Adam Audette, LED Digest 2371 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1773/55/ After years in business consulting, designing, delivering etc. you learn that a handshake and trust may work for you but it does not work in today's world. A contract with payment schedules 1/2-1/2 or 1/3-1/3-1/3 written in as completion dates arrive and work is completed is the appropriate approach. If you are not getting paid you are not getting in as deep if you would jump in head first and complete all the work and hurry up and wait for net 30 terms. Once you have an established relationship and you are doing monthly updates on a rolling contractual basis net 15 or net 30 terms can work but only if their is a good relationship. Let's face it, today even if it is in writing, without a good up front agreement you will always run the risk of getting burned or "bamboozled" as you said. It may not be possible to re-deploy the work as custom work for hire as usually corporate design is also copyrighted material. Prevention is worth a pound of cure. The aggravation of court, litigation or small claims and collection is just not worth the time. Best of luck. Bet Frank will never do that again! Ron Rizzi -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Marty R. Milette Subject: Bamboozled While getting stiffed on a job doesn't happen often for me, it does cause a lot of bad feelings and frustration -- especially when you bust your @ss to get out a 'rush' job or satisfy demands that both of you know very well are way out-of-scope of what they agreed to. So far, my most frequent non-paying clients have been from Australia -- they seem to take advantage of the fact that they are difficult / impossible to go after without spending more than the job was worth. In general, I have noticed that the clients who whine, haggle and beat you down on the price at the start of the job are invariably the ones I have the most trouble collecting from later. When clients stop replying to emails and / or returning phone calls and generally become 'unreachable' when it comes time for pay-day -- don't wait too long before becoming aggressive on collections. If the amount is large and you see obvious signs of a dead-beat -- it may be worth the trouble and expense of turning it over to a collection agency. Watch out for organizations working out of a foreign 'branch office'. These small offices may be incorporated as completely separate legal entities -- rack up huge liabilities and then just fold up -- leaving you no recourse against the 'home office'. Ya, been burned on that trick too. For large jobs, it doesn't hurt to build progress payments into the deal. (Even better to get an advance 'retainer' as well.) Clients don't like it, but on a high-risk job, you don't have many options. I know some people won't like this suggestion -- I may sometimes keep control over the server / hosting until final payment is made. If the client is intent on cheating you, it won't help a lot (they can screen-scrape the site anyway), but it does protect the coding at least. Final payment and giving the client the password (and telling them to change it immediately) are part of a normal 'handover' process. The best suggestion, and one that you should be doing regardless of the size of job, is to have a written agreement in place -- very clearly stating understandings, deliverables, timeframes and of course, financial details. Having a signature on that document gives you the legs to stand on in court -- but better yet, if everything is clear up-front, there are fewer 'misunderstandings' -- especially when the client tries to scope-creep you into the poor house. Marty R. Milette http://hotel-club.net ============ Sponsor Message =========== Pirates of the Caribbean, what a great flick. Lots of kids want to grow up to be pirates. Some go into the web content business. They loot copy from one client and sell it to many more. The clients get to walk the plank, because duplicate copy is a big SE no-no. At http://GetWebContent.com/LED our copy is custom crafted for you and you alone. ============ Sponsor Message =========== -------- new post - new topic --------- From: Joel Lesser Subject: Recip links > ... we received [a link request] the other day and the link > back was not on the client's site but on freepagerank.org. > Does anyone have any input on this type of backlink...? - Sandi Dettman, LED Digest 2372 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1774/55/ You didn't confirm your domain name that the link exchange was for. Assuming it was for your artist gift related site, a site from a webmaster resource related site such as the domain you indicated above would be irrelevant in my humble opinion and not advisable. I doubt your linking with this site will "hurt" you but it won't help you in terms of generating qualified traffic interested in your artist gift products. If you link to a lot of sites irrelevant to your own, it tells the search engines your link strategy is not completely focused on what benefits your end users. I have only seen link exchange "hurt" when a site links in very high volume to irrelevant low quality sites. A low number of irrelevant links won't hurt you but I would still recommend you avoid linking with irrelevant sites to your own. Make linking decisions for your end users. Ask yourself, "Does this site I am about to exchange links with benefit my end user's experience or help my end user learn more about my own product / service / information?" If the answer is yes, GET THE LINK. Disregard the other site's pagerank or related metrics. If you are not sure if the target site you are considering link exchange with will benefit your end user, consider skipping that link opportunity and move on. Make linking decisions for your end users in slow natural consistent volume and you will do just fine long term. Best Regards, Joel Lesser LinksManager.com http://linksmanager.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Charlie Rufus Subject: Recip links Hi, Google will degrade your site ranking if you engage in link swapping. They are wide awake to it. Cheers, Charlie Rufus www.intelgold.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Dirk Johnson Subject: Recip links Sandi, the emergence of three-way-link exchanges is just another example of bogus SEO theory run amok. Here's the deal with three-way linking. You get a link from a junk site, but they want you to link back to their primary site. That's a raw deal for you. Unless you want to set up a junk site as well, then you put their primary link on your junk site. At that point, you have "four way linking", and BOTH of you would have earned links from junk sites! So, why waste your time on any of this? Trash any link requests that imply a three-way link and move on. The whole concept of three-way links dates back several years to the wholly discredited theory that links out from your own domain would somehow "leak" away your own PageRank. This was despite the fact that PageRank, as it was presented originally as a concept by the Google founders, was based solely on links pointing back to a page. The links out from a page have no bearing on it's own PR value. But in SEO circles, facts often get in the way of a good scare theory. The "PR leakage" theory created widespread panic among a lot of so-called "leading edge" SEOs thinkers at the time. They drank that kool-aid. If you look around closely, you can even find remnant articles from some very big name SEO gurus who were in full panic mode about this subject. It's worth noting that most people in SEO circles survived this scare, as they had apparently stocked up enough canned goods and kool-aid to get through it. On the good side, the theory did create plenty of "make work" billings, as their client sites needed to be modified to comply with this new theory. Cooked-up SEO theories can be very lucrative for those who create them and then sell solutions for them. As the panic receded over PR leakage, these SEO gurus came to realize that links out from a site are not that of a bad thing. Maybe even helpful. Many of them grudgingly abandoned the PR leakage theory, and calmed down. Until they found something else to panic about and create more client billings. If the sky is not falling in some SEO circles, that's a bad thing. For them. Nevertheless, whacky SEO theories have a very long half life. They hang around as stale articles and stale postings in forums, which the unwitting read and believe. Three-way linking will never go away completely, but it can diminish if most people start refusing to link back under theses schemes. Best regards, Dirk Johnson DomainDrivers LLC www.domaindrivers.com -------- new post - new topic --------- From: Michael Linehan Subject: Standards > One person who responded to my post... mentioned > to me, as to why my page might not be ranking, is that > I had used three h3 tags in the left-side navigation [links]. - Tom Anson, LED Digest 2371 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1773/55/ The logic would be that headings are not just tags to be used for whatever purpose. Heading elements are not just some kind of text formatting, or a way of saying to the search engine, "This piece of text or link is important." Just as link tags are for links and paragraph tags are for paragraphs, heading tags are for headings - and that is all. They are the fundamental structural formatting of content that has been around since the beginning of the Web. Heading elements are one of the most critical ways the search engines categorize the information contained in a site. It is best to "talk to" the search engines by using heading elements to do what they are meant to do --- be headings. The heading structure is also critical for accessibility. Let's see what W3C has to say... The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG) clarifies, in its discussion of section headings: -------------------- "In HTML, H2 elements should follow H1 elements, H3 elements should follow H2 elements, etc. Content developers should not "skip" levels (e.g., H1 directly to H3)." -------------------- and also -------------------- "Sections should be introduced with the HTML heading elements (H1-H6). Other markup may complement these elements to improve presentation (e.g., the HR element to create a horizontal dividing line), but visual presentation is not sufficient to identify document sections." -------------------- In other words, heading elements need to be used for their intended job - to designate the sections and levels of content. This will become very confusing if a level is missed out, or h3s are used in the navigation, or the h tags are used in some random way on the page ---- or any number of other things we've all probably seen. By the way, while we're at it, please don't anyone use classes instead of heading elements. Saying class=heading1 to the search engines or to access aids (text readers) means nothing. Classes should never be a substitute for the fundamental formatting elements. Michael Linehan Marketing Alchemy www.marketing-alchemy.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Al Toman Subject: Standards > ... I don't recall ever seeing anything, > anywhere that suggested that hx tags > could not be used as links ... - Tom Anson, LED Digest 2371 Tom, Header Tags are associated with web page organization-structure. The W3C says (HTML 4.01 section 7.5.5): -------------------- "A heading element briefly describes the topic of the section it introduces. Heading information may be used by user agents, for example, to construct a table of contents for a document automatically. "There are six levels of headings in HTML with h1 as the most important and h6 as the least. Visual browsers usually render more important headings in larger fonts than less important ones." -------------------- ... and Eric Meyers concludes... -------------------- "So as far as a semantic definition of the heading elements goes, all we have is that heading levels indicate degrees of importance. Nothing about what order they have to be in, or whether you can skip levels, or anything else besides the creation of a spectrum of importance, as it were." Source: http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2004/07/21/pick-a-heading -------------------- Semantically, links are not degrees of importance in web page organization structure, therefore, they should not be built using header tags. As well, if you run your web pages through accessibility validators, you will receive a few words of comment about your (improper use) of header tags. These validators are not consistent among each other, however. It is a practice to have the h1 tag reflect the TITLE of the web page, keyword enriched. <.h1>WELCOME to MY WEB SITE<./h1> is NOT a cool h1 tag / title. SEARCH ENGINES and H tags: I cannot find any authority on this, just speculation. Maybe someone else has direct information from the search engines!?! I did find this, however: http://www.seoprinciple.com/no-title-tag-on-your-page... and http://seodelusions.com/2006/06/28/20/ NAVIGATION is BEST built using unordered lists or definition lists. An unordered list menu, horizontal or vertical looks like this:
Next, use CSS to decorate the list in any way you want (see: http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic/ ). Next, package the whole thing into a php include file. al toman studio9 web design ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by GetWebContent.com The Web's Most Experienced SEO Content Providers. Free no-obligation proposal: http://GetWebContent.com/LED The Archives: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/126/120/ Subscribe: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/52/77/ Unsubscribe, Change Email, or Hold / Resume Delivery: http://www.led-digest.com/content/category/4/17/86/ (c) Copyright 1995-2007 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "I can accept failure, but I can't accept not trying." - Michael Jordan |
