Everybody is talking about InLinks today. I’ve had access to the system for quite some time but haven’t ever bought or sold a link using it.

Before you get too excited about the opportunity please take some time to actually evaluate the sites offering links. You get to see the post title and a snippet of text before you purchase so it’s not hard to identify the site.

When I first took a look at the system I found that Engadget and Gizmodo were both selling links for $10 per month. Fantastic! Of course it was just scraper sites purely made for selling text links.

Secondly take some time to think about the nature of InLinks compared to normal blog links. A normal blog post has links added at the point of publishing - they don’t have keyword rich links added 6 months down the line.

You won’t get a penalty for adding external links to your old blog posts but it would be easy for Google to give them less weight.

Warning- The strategy below might be risky.

Zoe asked a question this week about the best way to remove old link exchange pages. I responded on Twitter but wanted to post about it as well.

It’s well known that having loads of links pages on your website isn’t a good idea. One links page with 20 links is fine, 10 links pages all with 100 links will probably do more harm than good.

If you have been given a penalty in Google then deleting all these links pages is the first thing you need to do. But what if your site is ranking well but you want to get rid of the pages before Google gives you a penalty? Surely if you remove the pages everybody will stop linking to you and your rankings will fall?

The key is to find a way of silently removing your links pages, without alerting all your link partners to the fact that their link has gone.

My solution is to make use of the X-Robots HTTP header that Googlebot is now supporting. This allows you to add the noindex meta information to a page server side so that visitors can’t see any traces in your robots.txt or your source code.

header(’X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow’, true);

This will remove your links pages from Google and probably won’t alert your link partners.

You might also like to cloak the X-Robots tag so that it only appears to Googlebot - you don’t want people to be able to run a header checker and see your sneaky plan.

Yesterday I was invited to attend what is probably the first time a group of bloggers has been let loose in £1 million worth of supercars.

Organised by 6th Gear Driving Experiences the day involved myself, Al Carlton, Dave Naylor, Kieron Donoghue and Chris Garrett.

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It’s early days but the Nintendo Wii Fit is looking like it might be the top selling product this Christmas after topping the search volume charts in October.

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Google has published an excellent guide about SEO today (embedded below) but I don’t think it gives enough information to small business owners about the importance of links.

Most people I meet have an understanding of basic on-page SEO. Very few people understand that for a new site to get to the top of even a moderately competitive industry it’s going to need the attention of a skilled link builder.
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Latest SEO Jobs

I’m pleased to confirm the venue details for Harrogate SEO.

Meet from 6pm in the Edward Room at the Cairn Hotel Harrogate (map). There is a bar available and we can chat about SEO, blogging etc. Perhaps we will have a site clinic or something too.

If you can’t make it by 6 don’t worry, just turn up whenever you can.

At 8.30 we have a table for 25 people booked at Joe Rigatoni which is an Italian restaurant just down the road.

If you don’t have my mobile number please drop me an email patrick @ branded3.com.

I’m sure most of you have read Shoemoneys blog post about how lucrative local affiliate marketing can be and are busy trying to figure out a strategy to make money from his ideas.

Most people can’t be bothered to make the connections with local businesses in the same way that Shoemoney did so we need to find a merchant that has a network of shops around the country and are willing to give commissions.
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Can you help Clarkson evade the angry truckers?

Fantastic viral marketing.