Regarding Organic SEO: in general all links are useful, although some of them from lower PageRanked web pages with lots of links coming from those web pages will do little for you. Google has much refined how PageRank gets into the algorithm and the old rules give only partial explanation of the way links work. However the value of a link to your website is probably still proportional to the PageRank of the web page divided by the number of links on that web page. So the ’sponsored ads’ that I run for Comtech Phones on the right of the web page for many of the Newsletters will be relatively strong. Most of them are PR 5 and have relatively few links out from them.

There are such things as bad neighborhoods but these are websites set up usually with thousands of links, which have employed black-hat SEO methods. They will usually have a PR of 0. However there are many perfectly good web pages that have a PR of 0 and links from them may be a tiny bit useful if you have lots of them.

Reciprocal links if with clearly unrelated websites will have almost zero value. So that is why a Links page put up just to encourage links from others is a waste of time.

On your question of a site map for blog entries, I would think the tool I’ve mentioned in the past would automatically pick them up.

Thanks for sharing this with the world, Tony. I think it’s good to get dialogues like this going. .. and of course the new links you create all help visibility.