Recently on the search engine optimization market emerged a new company LINKGATOR.NET claiming it will kill other seo competition by its new viral marketing idea. I want to digg into it to find out if its really viable.

On the early dawn of internet, when link exchange concept was in its nascent state there appeared an interesting multi level marketing approach to link building. The idea was pretty simple. A site owner had to copy some html page with 5 links on it to his own website and place a visible link to this page on his/her website's home page so that search engines could easily find the link and follow it to the special 'five links' page. At the bottom of this links page there was a short instruction for potential link swappers.
It read something like this: This is a great viral marketing technique that could bring thousands of links pointing to your websites along with massive traffic of targeted visitors if you follow our simple instructions.

You should copy this html page to some place on your own website, remove the first link and place your own link at number 5 place. You should keep the instruction bellow as well for others to follow.

Thus a link to your website could be shown on hundreds and thousands of websites. We could do a simple maths to find out how many links one could get if he/she invited 5 people, then they invited 5 people and so on down to 5-th level when you own link would be completely gone from the list.

5*5=25*5=125*5=625*5=3125 links. Then summing them all up 5+25+125+625+3125=3905 links! That was pretty much enough to make ones website be number one at major search engines on most competitive keywords at that time.

However, there were some major drawbacks in this simple and genius idea. First, no one could guarantee that all webmasters followed the simple rule of removing only the link number 1 in the list and placing their own link the last in the queue, that is number five.

There was a pretty spread practice of removing all the links all together and replacing them with one's own links. That ruined all the benefits of the brilliant MLM approach and interrupted the chain. In other words, no one was sure his followers would observe the rules and there was no control or checking system to catch the cheaters.

Second, all the links were one and the same, i.e. had one and the same anchor. At that time it didn't matter much when search engines algorithms were pretty simple, but these days you would have been quickly pessimised or filtered for this practice at the (very) least and completely banned in the worst scenario.

Third, all the pages had one and the same look and feel, since people were pretty lazy to change the design, though it was clearly and insistently advised to change it to fit the look of one's site. For this reason, it wasn't so hard for search engines to detect those websites which used this method and ban or put them under some filter.

Fourthly, not all partners who would follow you, would be from your own niche, which made those links not very effective. Say, if you had a 'dating' website but everybody you invited in your 'structure' was from health industry would not do you much good to be number one on dating keywords. This could significantly diminish the whole effect the system was designed for.

And the last drawback was that this system was designed primarily for the search engines optimization, and not for live visitors. If there was some way to put those links on a home page in some visible place, that could change the whole picture and beside a 'side effect' of driving traffic from search engines, it could bring targeted and interested live visitors who would be clicking on those links directly!

If some one could come up with a similar system but this time without its main drawbacks, it could change the world of seo completely. After investigating LINKGATOR.NET principles, opening a free account with them and getting a few dozens of links, I came up to conclusion that there might be 'something' in them.

Let's look how LINKGATOR.NET solves the above listed problems.

1) By having the centralized database, they now can guarantee that all partners follow the simple rules and have all the needed links placed on their websites. Cheaters are mercilessly banned for life.

2) They have no limitations on the number of anchors of one and the same link, and no limitations on the number of links themselves. As long as you have enough balance of their internal currence GATs one could place as many links/ads as he/she likes. Moreover, one could add some text before and after the anchor.

3) There's no need to change the look and feel of the links pages, since there are no of them. There's simply no need in them, because all links have to be placed on a home or main page in a visible place. They also so the problem of different platforms and operating systems by providing a unified rss/atom link feed. That's why any site could easily place their feed.
I found WordPress, Drupal, Joomly, TextPattern CMS that they support listed on their help page. They also provide rss parser php script for those websites written on plain PHP.

4) I was pretty impressed how they solved the problem of niches and maximized the number of targeted links to one's website. It is no secret that you should have as many as possible links coming from your niche to maximize the possibility for the search engines to place you in TOP 10. So, they give you links not only from partners you refer, but from the whole their system evenly. So one could now with no fear refer partners from, say, adult, niche and promote his/her own telecommunication website.

5) LINKGATOR.NET not only drives traffic from search engines, it gives you live targeted visitors too. So far as your links or ads are placed on their publishers website's home pages, and according to their rules, in some visible place, people do click on them, because the links are highly targeted and this way are interesting for the visitors.

owever, despite all these good things and advantages, there is one flaw in the system. It is pretty young and does not yet have many members. Though, it depends on from what angle to look at it. From the 'targetness' point of view, it has not many websites yet from all common niches and categories, but its number constantly grows and the time seems to solve this problem completely. From the point of viral marketing it is good, since you can invite more own partners into it and make much exposure of your own website.