The Keyword Academy held their monthly Thursday Webinar today and announced the updated version of Connect Content.  For those who have never heard of connect content it is a way of finding relevant backlinks to your niche sites.  You link to another webmaster’s site and receive points in exchange for doing so.  With those points you can submit links that you would like to receive for your own niche websites.

Connect Content was originally designed and launched by R.T. Cunningham and was received with excitement by most.  The idea of a centralized place to do link exchanges got the interest of a lot of the money makers in the niche site building industry.  The small cost of joining the system ($12) was supposed to keep out people who were not serious about link trading.  The problem, in part, was the point system as a webmaster who linked from a page with some decent PageRank would not necessarily get back the same juice from the links he got from others.

Enter Mark and Court of The Keyword Academy.  They “aqcuired” Connect Content from R.T. Cunningham and have changed the model of the point system for exchanging links and have also disallowed credit for links from free article submission sites and shady links from some blogger and WordPress.com pages.  This is an awesome change as it should clean up some of the ways users were using to get points.  These shadier methods of linking back to get points took away from the usefullness of the site and made it difficult to get quality backlinks for webmasters.

Mark and Court have decided to make it free for members of the The Keyword Academy.  This new feature creates huge value for the already awesome TKA site.  Normally the Connect Content price is $12 a month but you get it free with your membership to The Keyword Academy.  Add that to the first months cost of $1 and it has never been a better time to become a member.