LinkTrader – If you’re not using it, you’re cheating yourself.

This will be one of the most important articles you have ever read on search engine promotion. We strongly suggest you read it in full… several times.

If you are not using LinkTrader, you are ignoring the single most valuable web promotion tool available… period.

When it comes to promotion, the most significant feature ever added to the AddWeb product line is LinkTrader, which was added in AddWeb Version 5.0. Don’t kid yourself if you think otherwise. In fact, if you only use a single feature in the product, this is the one you should choose. Oddly, however, we have seen thousands of customers disregard it. If you are one of those, you may not be aware of the impact of this feature on your site’s search engine success. Let us explain…

Before continuing, read the following line several times:
AddWeb is not submission software. It is web promotion software that also offers a submission feature.

For years, it was believed that in order to get listed on search engines, you had to submit your site. The big debate has always been whether you should use an automated tool, or do it manually. In fact, AddWeb’s claim to fame has long been the submission feature. In fact, AddWeb has been typecast as a submission program, despite the list of features we have added over the years. I’ll help kill this typecast with a single statement: If you decide to ignore one feature in AddWeb, it might as well be the submission feature. The effectiveness of submitting to search engines is nowhere near what it used to be. If you want to get listed on engines, stop concentrating on submission, and concentrate on LinkTrader.

They may be quite a bit to swallow, but if there is any credible source for such a statement, it must be us. Keep in mind this statement applies to all submission software and all manual submissions to the bulk of the major engines. Submission is still relevant for some engines, including the minors and many internationals. However, if you want success on the majors, submission won’t do you much good anymore.

We have long known that Search Engine Submission was getting less effective, and such being the case, we have concentrated on features in AddWeb that would replace the submission feature. LinkTrader is just that. It not only replaces the effectiveness of submission, it gives you a better shot at good listings than submission ever could.

Let’s look at the process of a typical submission. You submit your site to the engine, and if successful, the search engine receives your request. They may look at it. It might be spidered or it might be ignored. We have all heard the stories of hundreds of thousands of submissions getting wiped out, or those that some engines penalize sites that submit, or that engines ignore most submissions. Furthermore, more and more engines are charging for submission.

In fact, if you have been keeping up, you certainly know what the engines say they want. They say that they want to discover sites with relative content. Some have said they prefer sites that are discovered naturally by their spiders. So what does that mean? If a search engine spider visits your site and follows a link to a different site that isn’t already indexed, that new site has been naturally discovered.

Another large issue is that of link popularity. More and more engines have gone to this for ranking. Simply put, all other things being equal, if the engine has 500 sites in its database that link to your site, and it has 1,000 sites in the database that link to your competitor’s site, your competitor gets higher ranking than you.

The problem for many webmasters is that they don’t have a list of a hundred sites that will provide links to them. So, for quite some time the answer to this question has been to submit to link directories (often called FFA sites). AddWeb answered this call long ago, and maintains a huge database of these sites. However, they have become less and less desirable for several reasons. For one thing, submit to these sites and you get bombarded with spam. That is the price you pay for these sites. More important these days is that they are not as effective as they once were. More and more search engines will not index off of the pages of known link directories, and your link rotates off of their pages so quickly due to thousands of sites listing on them, that the chances of getting found on one are very low.

So, submission yields lower expectations than before, as do link directories.

We are back to the problem in which most webmasters don’t have hundreds of sites that will link to them. This is where LinkTrader comes in. It addresses all of the issues, providing a great way to get indexed, build link popularity, and keep that spam down. Here is how it works:

You set up a LinkTrader account. It is free to all AddWeb 5.x customers. Once in the system, you have the opportunity to browse thousands of other LinkTrader listings. When you see a listing you like, click a link to request a trade. When the other webmaster logs into LinkTrader, your request will show up. If the webmaster believes your link would be a good addition to his or her site, it gets accepted. Each of you click a button in the system, which generates an attractive HTML page to place on your website… linking to the other webmaster’s home page. From time to time, you can log into LinkTrader to make sure your trading partners are linking to your site. It is easy and efficient.

The benefits of using the system can be monumental. The system has been online for 4 months. As of this writing, there are roughly 17,000 active trades in the system, and some sites have more than 300 active trades). Here is what you can expect if you had 100 trades:

1. 100 other websites would provide links to your website. If any one of those sites gets spidered by a search engine, your chances of being naturally discovered by the engine are very good. If you get spidered, you will have likely been added by the engine without having submitted your site.
2. For every site you are trading with that is indexed on a specific engine that ranks based on Link Popularity, your own link popularity score will be higher.
3. The pages that link to you are real. They are not dynamic pages that scroll you off like link directories.
4. The pages that link to you are on normal websites that are attracting human traffic that are far more likely to click on your link than they would on a link directory listing.
5. You are in an active role of cross-promotion with another person. The benefits of each trading partner’s own promotion will benefit you indirectly, and vice-versa.
6. You are active in a type of promotion that search engines have supported for years. Remember, search engines have long said that they want to discover links on pages that are human-maintained and are relevant. This is exactly that. The only difference is that the LinkTrader system operates as a matchmaker, and helps automate some of the tasks.

So here we are. We see people every day asking us why they don’t get results when submitting, and we almost always find that they are overlooking the most powerful resource available to them… LinkTrader. Yet, those who take advantage of the system invariably swear by it.

AddWeb is a suite of utilities, not just a submission program. Electing not to use all of the tools available is like buying a car for the stereo system and never driving it.

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