Being less than 2 weeks into blogging and greener than a fresh mint plant I wanted some of those lovely links and I was trying to find a way to get some! I had looked at the link trains but I didn't like the look of them, a long list of sites sometimes 200 names long planted in the middle of your blog, also I wanted to come up with my own unique idea, and experiment a little.
I still hadn't given up on the Randolink idea and it was after reading an excerpt from a book by Philip Ball Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another (<–hard going but "mindbendingly" interesting) mixed with MLM practices I began to form the idea for Viralink, the following day I sat at my computer, opened Wordpress, finalized my idea and pressed the publish button.
I understood the premise of anchor text when I decided to make a compact grid of 120 asterisk's (It looked much nicer than lists, "and it leveled the playing field") many people still say it is useless to link with anything other than anchor text but it is still a bit of a grey area weather Google takes into consideration anchor text whilst calculating Page Rank apparently it is a pure numbers game. Also it had never been tried before to my knowledge, I love to experiment, unfortunately I am guilty of making the Viralink too big 50 stars would have been suffice, that may links on one page will really water down the "PR weight" to other pages plus there is a risk of that particular page being ignored by Google for having too may links on or being a link farm. It will be exciting for the next PR update to see the results, as I mentioned earlier this is still an experiment.
The Technorati results speak for themselves, I'm in the top 8,000 (452 linking in and unable to stop!) from being around 120,000 something a month ago. On the downside my Technorati ranking caries no real weight but it was nice to see that it can be achieved and I have discovered some great blogs and people through this which I may never have found!
THE MONSTER
Whn starting Viralink I expected it either to be a flash in the pan and forgotten about within the week or I had thought it was going to be a slow burner and take about 8 month to get half the links it has currently returned. I am still astounded by the amount of incoming links I receive each day and the amout of emails I get saying how well this has worked for people! I have one problem now is that now im in the Viralink I cant get out! There really is no way to stem the flow and I wish I had recognised this at the start as I would have made this clear in the first post, I dont think anyone could have anticipated how far this was going to go!
HATERS
What is really interesting is after doing a search for the phrase "viralink" on Google is the amount of results which appear, it is truly fascinating to see the effects and the growth of this. Also the opinion on Viralinks is VERY divided, people either love it or HATE IT, it seems to be that it has been too successful and has began to become labeled by some as a spam device which was the last thing I wanted to happen. I hate spam just as much as everyine else especialy when you get several comments from Someone called: "adfgs" with an email address of "ojvfrjh@werfkhbv.com".
Fnally
So thats it, 28 days later, Viralink has brought in loads of links for myself and many other bloggers, it has spawned other evolved versions of itself, it has divided opinion, it has helped make some good friends and probably not so good friends? and is currently doing its own thing. I have no control over what happens to it from here on and, lets see what happens next!
If you enjoyed this post please feel free to buy me a gingerbread late! mmmm!
Tags:
Hi Andy,
chapeau for your idea of the Viralink. I think it brought most of the participiants a lot of backlinks and definitely an increase of technorati rank.
I had a technorati rank around 140.000 before and now I am finally in the top 10K.
So thanks for this idea and as well thanks to Jimmy for bringing it even further with ViralTags.
Let me know, when you are breeding something else…
Hi,
I change my blog name/web sites over the weekend.
too and never seen a link-train before.
ViralPosties is there now and I taught I had invented something new. I'm a newbie
ViraLink, ViraTags(Jimmy) did work very well for me and I build on them with ViralPosties. I kept the host tag and added the category. This way, people may want to read the post, should be easier to track(direct backlink and no technorati) and limited to 40 posts.
Host Tag: Contest- Spread the MIS specification word and win $200CAD
1. Contest- Spread the MIS specification word and win $200CAD
2. Entertainment - Does Hollywood lost some of it’s imagination?
3. ViralPosties
4. ViralPosties
5. ViralPosties
…up to 40.
Did the link-trains work exactly like that of those you have seen? Did they point to the same viral post or another post like I do now?
The next PR will be a hint if Vira… worked or not against us.
Steve
I have increased my Technorati ranking from 1 to 192, and I now have an alexa ranking. The biggest problem that I see in this is the maintenance. If this is to continue, it may be time for someone with more time that most to write a plugin. Copy & paste site name in url into a webform, and the plugin takes care of the rest.
Thats great, I love hearing how well this has worked for people. Iv thought about the plug in idea and i may work on on it as a pet project as I'm learning how to use PHP and SQL though at the rate I am currently progressing it will take ages! lol!
After Viralink and Tags is full I'm not sure if I will take part in any link trains again, I've loved the journey but I'm going to to try and climb the enormous traffic building mountain with good content
Hey Andy, love your write up. I have similar thoughts and I have made a post last night. There are other variants of Viralinks out there now so it is interesting to see. Boy I did not know that Ilker with the Icon train is charging people $20 to do a favicon …. wow, that is shrewd. I'll do make a post of how to do it for free in a heartbeat. That'll be one of my next post I guess.
I too will wait till the next Google PR to launch another blog marketing campaign … would like to see the effect of this. One thing I do know is that I am either No. 1 or 2 on Google SERP for the search terms I targeted when I started ViralTags. So let's see how long that holds. I've also enjoyed meeting new people and gaining new readership through ViralTags, so I am happy about that.
When I participated I went from 300,000 in technorati to being in the top 100K. I'm not sure how valuable it really was though.
Thanks for adding me to your viral link. More power to you too.