TLDR; If you have a crossword-related blog or website, add a permanent link to XWord Info on your home page, and we’ll give you four months of access for free. If you already have an account, we’ll extend it four months.
The web is a cutthroat place
It’s hard to make money from a website. XWord Info is an expensive site to run but we at least break even every month. That’s ok, we’re not looking to get rich, but we hate losing traffic to slimeballs.
You too can make money the clickbait way
Everyone hates clickbait sites but, like Nigerian 491 scams, they work, so they’re not going away.
Wanna make your own clickbait site? All you need to do is provide some text that Googlers are likely to enter, suck up that “organic” search traffic, and bombard the unsuspecting web surfers with ads.
Crosswords are an excellent Recommended Daily Allowance of clickbait fodder. Each day, you can be sure lots of people will get stuck on an answer and turn to Dr. Google for relief. XWord Info provides answers. So do all the crossword blogs. These good sites used to share that organic traffic, but lately much of it is going to clickbaiters. There’s nothing stopping your new clickbait site from joining in for fun and profit. You too can get rich from this One Weird Trick!
What can good sites do?
The key to fighting back is to make the legitimate sites more attractive to search engines. Part of that is the infamous Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Blogs based on the standard platforms do some of this automatically, but even bloggers need to care about esoterica such as meta descriptions and keywords, properly formatted header tags, etc. There’s big business in helping blogs and other websites optimize their SEO, even though the actual algorithms used by Google and Bing are closely held trade secrets.
The key factor for website legitimacy, though, happens externally. Search engines highly value incoming links from other sites they deem to be authoritative. In other words, the best way to combat the clickbait sites is to cross-link to each other.
So, you’re bribing us?
Exactly! XWord Info already links to several crossword sites on our home page. We link to many more on our Blogosphere page. We can do more, and if bribing you gets us to link to each other, we both win. You win, because you get more traffic plus a new account, or a four-month extension if you have one already.
Will this work?
The world of internet search engines is mysterious, but this looks like our best shot. There’s a Contact link here on every page. Let’s talk.