One of my clients, decorative concrete specialists, Dekorbeton , supply textured concrete stamping & overlay products. Based in Istanbul they hired English experts to keep their English language site content accurate with the correct navigation and tags etc. Their web experts also offered to create and publish featured links and specialist articles as an additional service. This lined up with a number of the carefully crafted services that I had seen offered.

The ‘internet marketing expert’, above, recommended a few good high quality links and loads of poor ones, the more the merrier.

When I investigated the in-links to www.dekorbeton.com I found this pattern, see the Market Samurai report summary, right. I drilled down to find their article content in sites such as EzineArticles and Articles3000. I followed 8 such sites providing 170 links, all from the 0/10 column. Now Google don’t provide comprehensive in-link data so I use Yahoo’s excellent SiteExplorer. Market Samurai’s tool does too then merging Google’s Pagerank data. So not every PR 0 link is in the Google index. I sampled 52 of the 170 article links to find that only 17 were indexed by Google! So 2/3 of these articles were a complete waste of time. (Based on 82% of Dekorbeton traffic coming from Google. Google’s search engine share was over 93%.)

Some of the articles were very relevent on patios etc. and of good quality. Most used keywords in the link text such as ‘brick wall overlay but often these were down in the author’s details. Many were on vaguely related topics such as soft furnishings and hydroponics. I am grateful to the director at Dekorbeton giving permission to use their data. I also confirmed that her own efforts in adding comments and answers on blogs, forums and other Web2.0 sites had a far greater impact.

You can read more about this over on the CCM Blog.