LinkWorth will be making our first visit to the annual Vegas WebmasterWorld Pubcon Conference November 14-17.  We have had several clients ask if we would be in attendance and show interest in meeting with us, therefore, we are considering putting a LinkWorth Sponsored Happy Hour Wednesday evening at an undisclosed location.

Our options are still being determined and we will post the location and exact time as soon as it is nailed down.  Participants can be existing clients, as well as potential clients.  We would even like to meet some of our market peers if the time and location fit your schedules.

So check back and we will have the LinkWorth Happy Hour exact location and time posted for those interested in a few drinks on the house.

As many probably already know, we officially launched our new product “LinkWords“. The product is built on the in-text pay per click technology where keywords are mined out of the content and matched with advertiser ads. With a simple mouseover, a tooltip window will appear showing the advertisers advertisement. This is probably one of the best methods in gaining targeted traffic one can use and we are excited in being able to offer our own version.

For Partners, it’s 100% free to signup and very easy to setup on your website, or websites. Every click charges the advertiser and partners earn 70% of the charge. We urge all partners to give it a shot and give us your feedback. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain, like money! 🙂

For Advertisers, targeted traffic is what we all want and LinkWords is the product to provide this. The ads shows on keywords within content people are reading. The ads are not appearing on the side, top, bottom or any other often overlooked section of a page, the ads are planted right in the middle of the content everyone is reading. Only pay for the click and yes we have fraud protective measures setup to ensure ads are not fraudulently clicked.

There are a couple of other companies offering their own version of LinkWords; however, they do not cater to everyone. Unless your website meets their extensive traffic requirements, no participation for you! LinkWorth is all about catering to the average customer “and” large customers. If your website has only THREE people visit it on average per month, how can someone say those three visitors are not important? They could be multi-billionaires looking to invest a ton of money in your company. So LinkWords is open to all of our customers and anyone that wants to be a LinkWorth customer.

Read more about LinkWords . . .

For those interested in our LinkWords launch, the initial October 4th date was unable to happen. We do apologize for the missed target date, but we are working out a few kinks and bugs before making it available to everyone.

Currently we are looking to launch LinkWords on Wednesday, October 11, pending the completion of a few upgrades.

All beta partner participants can leave their code as is and the transition from beta to live will not require any changes.

All beta advertisers will be required to add funds into their account for further publication of ads. Any fake funds added during beta will be zeroed out before the actual launch.

For the near future of LinkWorth, look for several new products, a much needed Control Center upgrade and very detailed Help Files being created. Stay tuned and we will make further announcements as they come available.

With the current landscape of Link Building transforming constantly, one product LinkWorth offers is standing out among the rest for its’ value and strength: Billboard Ads. A Billboard Ad is an article written by an Advertiser which has static text links embedded within the content of the Article. This holds, at least in our opinion, a very strong value because the links are within the content of the page instead of in an area of the page where they are easily distinguished as paid links.

We have found through trial and error that Billboard Ads are not only a great value to our Advertisers, but to our Partners as well if done in the proper way. The two keys to successfully utilizing Billboard Ads are:

1. Make the Billboard Page on the Partner Site look like it “belongs” to the Partner Site. Simply calling the provided include file in a blank page does not do much to help the Partner or the Advertiser. If an Advertiser is using the same content among more than one Billboard Ad, it can get marked as duplicate content and not be included in Google’s index. This devalues the links within the Billboard and may throw a red flag up for the Partner because they have “duplicate content” on their site. This is easily resolved with a little work though. Most Partner’s have templates they use to create a new page on their site or use include files for the elements of a page of their site that stays the same from page to page. When creating the Billboard Ad, it is highly advised that you use this template (or include files) and simply call the provided code in the content area of the page. Plus, when we build these internally for our Advertisers, we’ll request this of the Partners.

2. The second important factor in successfully utilizing Billboards is to have a site wide link to the Billboard Ad from every page of your site. It holds the most strength if this link is close to the other Navigational links of your site. Since the posted links all point to a subpage on the Partner site, the site-wide link isn’t suspicious and shouldn’t dilute the Partner’s site at all.

As we move deeper into the constantly evolving world of linking, this product will continue to gain popularity. So, LinkWorth Partners, accept Billboard Ads! You’ll stand to gain Advertiser market-share within our community! These will be key components to many of our Managed Services campaigns moving forward, too. For more info on Billboards, visit http://www.linkworth.com/products/billboard-ads.php …

As some of you may have noticed, our file inclusion feeds were displaying an error today. Not all file inclusions were displaying this error, but all it takes is a few to be an issue. The reason for these issues is due to a system upgrade we performed which surprised us with a few incompatibilities.

Our programmers are working quickly to update these problem area’s and should have everything back to normal very shortly. We do apologize for this unplanned update and assure you it will be fixed quickly.

If you have any questions or concerns, our help desk is running fine at http://help.linkworth.com.

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Update: Everything is worked out and running smoothly. If there is anything still wrong on your end, please submit a support ticket.

With the recently launched payment arm of Google, known as “Google Checkout“, online merchants are finally getting much better options to process credit cards on their websites. Processing credit cards through the internet is such an important step for any online merchant, it is important to attach your business with a reliable and trustworthy credit card merchant. Credit card merchants will handle Visa & MasterCard, with AMEX and Discover running their own show. Then third party credit card merchants are more of a middle man between you and the actual card merchant. Now let me shed a little light that might help in getting your credit card processing setup right the first time.

3rd Party Merchant Companies – Pro’s & Con’s

• Very easy and quick to get setup and process for customers
• Large companies (Paypal * Google Checkout) make it easy to buy/sell at low prices.
• Monthly volumes can fluctuate, but are easier to go higher
• payments usually occur on weekly, bi-weekly or monthly schedules
• first glimpse of fear, processor will place hold on all funds and cease payouts
• usually require a reserve or rolling reserve, usually a percentage of each payout
• provides their own custom built software to easily function transactions
  
  

Direct Merchant – Credit Card Processing – Pro’s & Con’s

• Signup process can be lengthy and require quite a bit of upfront details that play into the approval/denial stage.
• Monthly volumes must start low or will fall into high risk, with financials of past history to qualify
• payments will occur on a daily basis less their fees
• any remote thought of fraud or chargeback’s and your account is frozen with no money being deposited but it will still allow processing to go through and charge you for the transactions. Getting account in good standing can take anywhere from 1 week to 3 months, along with money being returned. Usually, if your account is closed, cut your loses and find a new processor.
• rolling reserves and/or set reserve required for higher risk accounts.
• Gateway provides software to get instant approvals, but software from your site to talk to the gateway is your responsibility
• This method is a great way to go if you can find a reliable merchant and you sell a product or service that everyone loves 100% of the time.

Direct Bank Credit Card Processing

• Fairly lengthy application, with large monthly volumes more accepted. Especially if you are an existing bank customer.
• Batch payments occur daily
• Holdback and/or reserves typically are not necessary
• Risk department is proactive in working with client to resolve issues
• Provides gateway of your choice and software of your choice.
• This is the best way to go.

Oddly enough, it crossed my head to signup for Google Checkout just to see if they would process for our service, since they seem to have turned their backs on the text linking industry

For those who have used our support section recently, you should have noticed things look a bit different. Due to the software we use being outdated; we felt it was time to upgrade to the latest, greatest version. The new version is a major update which led to several changes with how LinkWorth and the software interact. If you were used to a certain way our support worked before, we apologize as it might be a little different.

There are a couple of areas we’re still working on, but the functionality of our support system should have no issues. We do request that if anyone runs into an issue, please email support.

One of the advantages to LinkWorth, from an advertisers point of view, is they are able to see the websites before they actually spend money to advertise on it. Most other services within our market restrict the actual web address for several reasons, until it’s paid for. As a partner, this option isn’t always the most preferred method. I choose not to get into specifics, but there are pro’s and cons for either way.

We’re proud to announce that we know give the partner a choice in this matter. If being anonymous is your cup of tea, you can now be anonymous to window shoppers. When listing a new site or editing an existing site, there is a new option available that allows the partner to hide their web address until an advertiser actully buys a text ad. Once the request is approved by the partner, then the advertiser will see the website address in their approved listings.

Obviously, we recommend the listings not be hidden to increase sales, but if it’s important to the publisher, the option is now as easy as turning it on. One thing to note, this is a per site setting. If 10 sites exist, all 10 would need to be edited to turn this feature on. All statistical information will remain available to potential advertisers.

Google makes announcement regarding an update, or improvement, to their Googlebot. This is the update found on the Google Webmaster Central Blog:

Most people know that Googlebot downloads pages from web servers to crawl the web. Not as many people know that if Googlebot accesses a page and gets a 304 (Not-Modified) response to a If-Modified-Since qualified request, Googlebot doesn’t download the contents of that page. This reduces the bandwidth consumed on your web server.

When you look at Google’s cache of a page (for instance, by using the cache: operator or clicking the Cached link under a URL in the search results), you can see the date that Googlebot retrieved that page. Previously, the date we listed for the page’s cache was the date that we last successfully fetched the content of the page. This meant that even if we visited a page very recently, the cache date might be quite a bit older if the page hadn’t changed since the previous visit. This made it difficult for webmasters to use the cache date we display to determine Googlebot’s most recent visit. Consider the following example:

1. Googlebot crawls a page on April 12, 2006.

2. Our cached version of that page notes that “This is G o o g l e’s cache of http://www.example.com/ as retrieved on April 12, 2006 20:02:06 GMT.”

3. Periodically, Googlebot checks to see if that page has changed, and each time, receives a Not-Modified response. For instance, on August 27, 2006, Googlebot checks the page, receives a Not-Modified response, and therefore, doesn’t download the contents of the page.

4. On August 28, 2006, our cached version of the page still shows the April 12, 2006 date — the date we last downloaded the page’s contents, even though Googlebot last visited the day before.

We’ve recently changed the date we show for the cached page to reflect when Googlebot last accessed it (whether the page had changed or not). This should make it easier for you to determine the most recent date Googlebot visited the page. For instance, in the above example, the cached version of the page would now say “This is G o o g l e’s cache of http://www.example.com/ as retrieved on August 27, 2006 13:13:37 GMT.”

These are ten factors one can check when trying to decide if a particular website is worth the link:

10: High link popularity score (more inbound links) run site: (siteurl).

9: High PageRank in Google toolbar. 4-5 up to 7 or 8. (mean’s they’re indexed well, usually)
8: Well laid out site with easy navigation from page to page throughout the site.

7: Pages full of content with regard to the site theme.

6: The page has a well indexed cache stored on Google/Yahoo/MSN, along with recent date.

5: The inbound/backlinks are mostly from sites on topic and are full of relative content.

4: The partner site has only outbound links to other same theme sites.

3: The outbound links are very limited. Below 10 is good, but preferrably below 5 outbounds.

2: The partner website/domain has an age minimum of 2-3 years old through registrar.

1: The price is relatively competitive and the partner is trustworthy.

Just like any list, there are many additional steps that one can follow, but these are the 10 we’ve decide to make for this list. The best way to finalize your own steps, is to run and test campaigns on your own.