One of the blogs I’ve become very interested in lately is having a contest - review the Linkrain Articles blog, get a free PR4 backlink, and possibly win $50. Linkrain is run by Andreas Moser, who works for a real estate site as the SEO and Marketing Manager. Among other sites, he runs the Linkrain Web Directory, which is the parent site for his Linkrain Articles blog. I’m happy to do my own review of this blog.

Ok, BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) Scoring (0-10; 0 being shite and 10 being the Google-buster):

• Design: 6
• Content: 9
• Communication/Community: 8

The details:

Design: Although I rated Linkrain’s design a 6, the overall design is solid. Clean, functional, but nothing special or fancy. He recently cleaned up his design a bit, such as getting rid of The World’s Most Beautiful RSS Button (it really wasn’t). I’d probably give him a 7, but I’m seeing the sidebar sitting below the blog entries in IE6. It looks fine in IE7.

Content: This is where Linkrain shines (is there a pun in there somewhere?). Andreas has some great tips and advice, and he seems to share it freely. Here’s some of my favorites that you might like, too:

• How to spend 400$ in advertising and get 1.000’s of Backlinks
• How to make $9000 per month with Wordpress themes
• Rank high in the search engines and choose the right keywords for your website
• Tips on buying links - link buying guide

I didn’t particularly care for his posts on Good/Evil blogs or Madeleine McCann, but there’s tons of other posts that are great and definitely worth reading.

Communication/Community: While probably not a full community yet, Andreas has some great communication on his blog. He responds to comments, has the top comments plugin to reward frequent commenting, and has launched a very useful Ask/Answer program. This really gets readers engaged and coming back for more.

Overall, I really like Linkrain Articles SEO Blog, and I look forward to reading it every day. I suggest you at least give it a read or two.