Latest news:

Online Retail Spending continues to climb ... but site visitors fall:
Figures released from the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index indicate that the UK's online spending in September'08 approached £5 billion, over £80 for every person in the UK. Intenret spending is 14.8% higher than a year ago.

However Hitwise traffic figures released indicated that the number of visitors to retail sites was 0.5% lower in October'08 than a year ago. Perhaps this suggests a trend towards internet shoppers spending less time browsing different sites as they become more familiar with the sites they use.

IMRG
Hitwise.

Web Links - Recognition Project

Participate in Our Project to help New Websites gain Link Recognition

You will understand the dilema. Search Engines rate your site, in part, according to it's link popularity and long established sites will understandably have those inbound links. But with a new site how to you go about getting others to see your site, to recognise it's worth and link in?

The answer for many is reciprocal linking arrangements, link exchanges and paid for links all of which arguably to a greater or lesser extent will be frowned upon by Google as not being in the spirit of genuine popularity based linking - "natural links" as they term them.

Google's view on linking:"Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines."

We have therefore decided to try a new approach - in the true spirit of the Google ideal - but enable webmasters of new sites to submit their sites in bulk to a directory where other webmasters can consider those sites, and content, to link to. It is not reciprocal linking. There are to be no agreements for a link back. However we would expect webmasters of sites wanting to be linked to, to devote some time to considering the link requests of others wishing to have inbound links.

As such we will look to develop a community of webmasters, willing to look at each others content with a view to link into it whilst others look at their content with a view to linking into them. Properly adopted this fulfils all of Google's requirments for natural listings - we are merely encouraging the process of looking at each others sites and linking into what is good. "Unpopular sites" (meaning those sites that have few links in from within the community) will be promoted to other community members by being at the top of lists for consideration in the anticipation, if their content is useful they will become more popular. Either way they will in time drop down the lists either because they have now become more popular or they have been unable to attract links we must assume their content is not attractive to other community members.

How it works

• You register as a webmaster with us and notify us of your URLs that you are seeking to attract more inbound links for and your URLs that you may be willing to link out from to relevant sites from within the community. The domains will normally be the same but might be different if you are a webmaster with different domains that you ar elookign to promote from those that you feel are relevant to link out from.
• We add the domains you are looking to promote to our listing which we email out to community members. We "rank" our list so that the most active and newest members with the fewest inbound links appear nearest the top.
• If you decide to link to a domain on the community list - let us know so we can update our records for everyone. This will also promote you as an "active" member encouraging your own sites listed for promotion to be considered by others.
• Likewise notify us when you make changes to your urls that others may be linked into or drop links form your site. There is of course no penalty for dropping links - the fact you keep us informed encourages you as an active member - natural links are bound to evolve so we expect content to be fluid and links will change to reflect that. After all we all know that to keep websites popular you need to keep them relevant with the latest and best informaton out that - and that will include ensuring your outbound links are to the latest and best in relevant material.

All sounds a bit casual?

Yes and it probably is. And as such we hope will prove to be a more genuine way of promoting new and revamped sites effectively without resorting to the potentially costly and search engine dubious routes of paid links, link farms and reciprocal link agreements.

Anyway what have we got to lose? Give it a go by registering now. We will keep all those registered, up to date with how the project is going and adapt the model from what we learn.