Great SEO Link Opportunity from Dr. Adsense

A high PR one-way link for 2 years… for about a hundred bucks?

Joel Comm, aka Dr. Adsense, is at it again.

Over the past several months, I’ve become a big Joel Comm fan.

• He has a lot of authentic cred as a Web entrepeneur, for co-creating the original viral gaming hit that became Yahoo! Games.
• He has written the best all around master guide book for Adsense publishers, Making Money With Adsense (read my review here).
• He is about to launch a very hot Adsense templates package that will put every other template pack to shame (click here to get details and a free “Blogging with Adsense” report).

Joel really knows what he’s talking about, and he is an expert at turning great ideas into strong, useful products. Pay attention to him, and you make money.

So this morning, out of the clear blue (no advance notice whatsoever, as far as I can tell), he launched 500Words.com. I glanced at his e-mail announcement as I was about to head out the door for a meeting with a client. And I immediately re-scheduled the meeting, to spend a half hour grabbing my own piece of the action.

In short, 500Words.com is a great way to get instant traffic to a brand new site, such as an Adsense-supported info site.

The idea is quick and easy. 500Words.com is a page filled with… ahem… 500 words. It looks like a bigger version of the “hot tags” listings at social bookmarking sites like Technorati. Each word links to someone’s site, and you or I can buy a word for as little as $50 (realistically, about $100 once you pay for formatting enhancements to make the word stand out).

The point is, this page will get a lot of traffic and links, thanks to viral buzz and promotion. It will get good Google PageRank as a result. That means the links will pass valuable search ranking weight on to the linked sites, and also drive good targeted traffic to them.

It’s like last year’s well known (and ridiculously successful) million dollar pixel page promotion, only this one offers real search optimization value - by virtue of the keyword-linked words - in addition to traffic.

Jump on this quick, if you’re setting up a new Adsense site. As I write, less than 12 hours after launch, 500Words.com has already sold nearly half of its available words.

Insider Tip: if you don’t see the word you want or need, you can ask for it. Just look for the “Suggest a word” link at the bottom of the page, it’s just as quick and easy to buy a custom word as it is to buy one of the pre-defined choices.

Dangers of Tag and Ping? Lose Your YPN Account!

I’m a little slow on the uptake, but I’ve just come across an article presenting credible evidence that it may be dangerous for Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) publishers to use social networking sites such as MySpace as traffic generators.

For example: by jumping on the heavily-promoted “Tag and Ping” bandwagon.

Search Engine Journal has documented cases of YPN terminating publisher agreements for “poor quality traffic” where it has found a large volume of visitors to the publisher’s site coming from social networking giant MySpace.

Actually, this is the first time I’ve seen real documentation of either YPN or Google AdSense shutting down a revenue publisher for cultivating dodgy sources of traffic. There is a lot of rumor and assumption in the Internet marketing world about this issue, but no evidence at all, one way or another.

The take-away for me: if they will shut you down for pulling traffic from a major, legitimate site like MySpace, you can be darned sure they will shut you down if you play with “link exchange” or auto-surf services, and similar shady practices.

So don’t do it!

And while you’re (not) at it, maybe think twice about the Tag and Ping thing.