I have not been in the class in about a year so maybe you have covered this recently.

Plug Boards are popping up everywhere:

1. Do they help at all for SEO?
2. What do you think about them for marketing outside of SEO?

Thanks,

Cynthia Powell, South Carolina
Chicks & Cubs

Hi Cynthia!

You didn’t mention if you are asking about plug boards from the standpoint of adding one to your website, or as a method to increase incoming links. To be on the safe side, I will try to touch on this topic from both aspects.

Part of this goes back to website credibility. Take some time to browse the net, and tell me how many professional businesses you see using plug boards? In my humble opinion, plug boards may be cute for personal homepages, but they have absolutely no place on a professional business site.

The decision to place an outgoing link on your website should always be based on only one factor — are you adding the resource specifically for the benefit of your visitors?

If not, you are adding it for the wrong reason.

While developing a solid online business that you can depend on, both now and in the future, I generally recommend extreme caution when it comes to jumping on the bandwagon of the newest online fads of increasing traffic to your site. It simply isn’t worth the risks involved.

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. Webmaster Guidelines

In most cases your will find that these types programs are of little or no value to your site and could potentially cause serious problems for you in the major search engines.

Much like any other artificial method of increasing links with the intent of increasing your site’s ranking, the major search engines are not likely to look on these types of links favorably.

Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors.

Unnatural links to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines. Some of these types of links (such as link schemes and doorway pages) are covered in our webmaster guidelines. Only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site. Webmaster Help Center

There are no shortcuts to increase links to your website that will be effective long term. It really does come down to hard work, and developing the type of content that people want to link to naturally.

I WILL DEFINITELY SEE YOU AT THE TOP!

Ask Cricket Small Business Marketing Consultant and SEO Training Specialist
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