Nathan CrauseMusings of a Software Developer

There are many guides out there on how to increase your blog traffic. The odd thing I discovered, however, is that using these techniques do not really seem to have much of an affect on your Google PageRank (something blogger services such as PayPerPost, SocialSpark and others use). After three months of trying all the techniques I could find (most of which are just rehashes on the same theme), my Google PageRank was exactly ... zero.

Now, as you can see from the bottom of my site here, I am currently at PageRank 4. This happened, quite literally, over the span of one week. And it's no secret how I did it. The method has been around longer than Google ... a little idea called link exchanging.

In particular, I signed up to a service called Link Market. It's a very crude interface, not particularly good looking, but I can hardly complain given the results. Within 48 hours of signing up, I had over 50 link exchange requests. About 6 or so were from websites which were poorly designed (using AJAX and such to generate the lists which wouldn't help with PageRanking, since Bots don't execute AJAX as a matter of course), or never actually added my link to their site (which they have to do first before you add their link).

The beauty is, you can tuck the links page away, with a simple navigation to it (see the "Links" option on my navigation here) so it doesn't pollute the look and feel of your site, and you gain a huge amount of link-backs within a very small space of time.

Try it yourself - see if you can get from PageRank 0 to PageRank 4 using any other technique. I certainly couldn't, but I'd be interested to know if anyone else has managed to do it some other way.