Novice Bloggers

Interview with Daniel McGonagle of LinkVanaReviews

Posted on 06. Sep, 2010 by Senthil Ramesh in Internet & Web Design, Interviews, Link Building, Marvelous Mondays

Hello everybody, once again we are back in Marvellous Mondays with Interview. Today we are interviewing Daniel McGonagle who is a Link Building Expert, who reviews Link Building services in his site http://www.linkvanareviews.com/

Me: Hello Dan. Kindly say a few words about yourselves and your site.

Daniel McGonagle: Hi all, I have been an affiliate marketer for 8 or so years now, and I started the site because I really liked that service (at the time) but soon realized that link building comes with a price, it costs time and money and your efforts had better be paying off well for you in order for a service to be worthwhile using. 

After using the service for a few months with good results, I wanted more ways to increase my backlinks power and diversity effectively, and started to use and review other link building services.   So, what started out as a single service affiliate review site turned into a site that uses, tests, and reviews several programs, tools and services…and strategies, too.

Me: Cool one. So you must be knowing many link building strategies. Which one do you think the best and why?

Daniel McGonagle: Ah, that’s always a question that people have, should they do blog commenting, directory submissions, article marketing, guest blogging, social bookmarking etc… but the real answer, in my opinion is that it’s really dependent on the niches involved, whether or not the webmaster’s niche is a competitive high traffic niche, or low competition niche with no real SEO competition. 

So the answer differs, varies on niche by niche basis, with the breakdown being: low, medium, and  tough SEO competition.I could answer that question better if I took the question and answered it on a niche competition level basis .If you want, I could describe what "tough SEO competition entails"… or medium or low

Me: That’s always a politically correct answer.So, what does LinkVana refers?

Daniel McGonagle: If refers to the program I originally made an affiliate review site for, but I intend to transfer that entire site over to something that’s less program name-associative, because I’m not even recommending that program/service any more…

Me: Also what are your thought on Link wheel techniques? Is it growing or outdated?

Daniel McGonagle: Link wheels techniques are popular query these days, still, but it drives me nuts when I see people looking at linking schemes like this whilst forgetting about marketing schemes….

[22:01:56 | Edited 22:02:46] Daniel McGonagle: What really matters, and what made thes ecomplicated inter-linke dlink wheels work so well for a while is they weren’t seen as schemes and weren’t getting de-indexed, but when one spoke in a link wheels gets de-indexed the whole “house of cards” comes crashing down and people start thinking link wheels are getting their sites “slapped”, when in reality there was just a spate of de-indeixng going on…

Me: Is it? Fine. Do you think Social Media Marketing can get more links and more popularity than anything else? Nowadays, our site reaches people through Social Media rather than it reaches bots through Directory Submission.

Daniel McGonagle: OK, social media can get you 100s or even thousands of links if you’re a power-Digger or just a power social media presence, but these links from the social sites aren’t what drives the rankings up for certain terms…  When someone finds your content via the "social web" the writes about it on their site and links back to your content, then that’s where the real SEO value comes into play.

However, what anchor text are they using to link back to your article with, and is it DoFollow?

Me: Of course not everything is dofollow. I would agree that Medias can bring traffic but the permanent traffic is achieved thru SEO in long term

Daniel McGonagle: Exactly, and people should test this out, by comparing what 100 Diggs or Sphinns do for their rankings for a certain term, versus article marketing, and mass article syndication with properly allocated and desired anchor text in those articles

So, the real value in social media is PRESENCE, and being able to drive traffic to something… anything…. at will which is great for the pro-SEOs who Tweet and Sphinn urls all day long and get other power users to do the same.  Then they can tell their clients that they’re driving major traffic to their sites, whilst using their staff to build up the rankings via link building efforts that actually work at raising rankings for certain terms. 

Also, even though many of these social media giants are NoFollow they do provide some value in regards to building search engine trust, since sites like Digg and Sphinn and Stumble upon are highly trusted by the search engines and sometimes help for building Page Rank of destination sites, and urls.

Me: Ok Dan, I can see its patience that takes the front seat when it comes to SEO and Link Building.  How often do you blog? Its consistency that matters in blogging, isn’t it?

Daniel McGonagle: Yes, on SEO being a patient person’s game, No on frequent blogging being necessary to maintain rankings or credibility

Me: So do you say that frequent blogging is not necessary to maintain rankings and credibility?

Daniel McGonagle: It helps to be an active blogger though, it just depends on what the goal of the site is..

Me: Agreed Dan. As a final question, what do you think of NoviceBloggers.com. Can we do anything to improvise ourselves.

Daniel McGonagle: Yes,definitely you should. I can see more tech related things than blogging. But it should be the other way around.

Me:Definitely we will make steps for improving as you said. It has been nice to talk to you. Hope our users have got some valuable information from you. Thank you for the time, Dan.

Daniel McGonagle: That’s my pleasure.

In fact,a long , but useful interview I guess. Kindly share your thoughts on this.

Related posts:

1. Interview with Mohit Aneja, CSS expert
2. Interview with Simon from Teenius
3. Interview with S.Pradeep Kumar of HellBoundBloggers

Tags: Interviews, link building