The Affiliate Journey

Long title for a really short post I promise!

Do you do your own link building?
Do your outsource link building?
Do you have ANYTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH LINK BUILDING?

If so listen up… I’m going to share with you a very quick point of interest that I consider to be the “secret sauce” of link building.

When I first tell you I know you’re going to say whaaa… com’on that’s not secret, everyone knows about this. How ever not everyone pays attention or even cares about it… And It ain’t Page Rank.

Ready… here it is….

CACHE DATE

That’s right, if you’ve been buying, building, trading, swapping or what ever you do for links based on page rank stop it. I use only three things to decide whether a link is worth while going after and the very first is cache date. I’ll get to all 3 things I look at soon, but first let me explain why cache date is important.

Keeping it Fresh!

If you read my recent post about What no one wants to tell you about link building then you already got a taste of this.

You see getting a link on a page of another site is the first step to building incoming links. The next step is ensuring that Google, yahoo & MSN (if you care about Bing…) find it. If your link is on a page that never gets indexed in Google then it might as well not even be there. You want to find links that are on some what theme’d pages, that have less then 30-40 out going links (the fewer the better) and are being cached frequently, preferably every 10-15 days.

How to Check Cache Dates

I hope most of you know how to do this but just in case you don’t here’s the deal. If you are in the Google SERPS there’s a CACHE link beside the SERP result. You can click that and it will show you the most recent cache of that page. If you have the Google toolbar installed then you can click the arrow beside the PR bar and it will give you three options, the first of which is “Cached snapshot of page”. This will also give you the recent cache date.

Look for pages that have a cache date from the last 10-15 days… the newer the better this means your link will get found and counted.

So that’s it… the secret sauce of link building. Use this like a mantra for yourself before you go head over heals trying to get your link placed on a PR4 or 5 page. Remember if it ain’t cached it don’t matter!