What a graph.

Two companies I have looked at recently are Local Web Ring – a ‘local’ link network associated with a small web design company, and Be Found or Die – a more proffessional SEO company bidding on the term ‘search engine optimisation’.

The first, although containing a number of sites that I don’t think are ‘local’, and using very blatantly optimised anchor text, is almost forgiveable because of the fact that the majority of the sites are pretty small businesses, and in the Cheshire area.

The second is more suprising because I would have thought that this would not be effective for any of their clients, and that they might have been penalised for operating like this. They not only have a load of optimised text links to their clients in the footer of their homepage, as well as on links pages on their client’s websites, they also link back to their own site on ‘search engine optimisation uk’ on some of their client’s websites.

Be Found or Die are not ranking in the organic results for ‘search engine optimisation uk’ but their clients seem to rank ok for the niche terms that they are going for – (Nutley Tiles on the first page for ‘marble tiles‘). Am I showing my ignorance for thinking this was an ‘old school’ SEO tactic that shouldn’t work anymore?

I don’t want to – but all I can takeaway from this is: Link Networks Work

*Guest post by Rob Green