| Recent Articles |
Does Google Hate PayPerPost?
Ted Murphy of PayPerPost has a post up about what appears to be another Google PageRank restructuring, which Ted says is specifically directed at PayPerPost and posts from Andy Beard at WebProNews and...
In SEO, Be A Tortoise, Forget The Hare
On Aaron Wall's site www.seobook.com, Aaron Wall makes a statement which makes me chuckle every time I read it, not because it isn't somewhat true, but because I can imagine how it must drive others crazy. Aaron...
The Dark Art Of SEO
The title of this article is designed to illustrate the point of this article. Today we won’t be taking a look at black-hat search engine optimization tactics. Admittedly, I’ve toyed with them in a "know your enemy" kind of...
Long Tail Keywords
As you're learning about search marketing and SEO, you will definitely run into the phrase "the long tail". Let's turn this odd term into a familiar one by looking into long tail keywords. What are Long Tail Keywords?
Be Found Where People Are Looking
Do you know where your prospective customers spend their time online? Do you maintain a presence in those places? Last night I came across an AP article about...
The Wordpress Dashboard - Another Potential Traffic...
Here's a cool "secret source" of blog traffic I discovered some time back… A couple of months ago, I wrote a post and thought it might have been of interest to the readership of Weblog Tools Collection (a very...
|
|
|
|
12.10.07
PubCon - Unjust Link Buying Worries
 By Aaron Wall
So Worried that You Forgot to Compete
While on the link buying panel at WebmasterWorld's Pubcon a few people were pushing that you might need to consider how Google will view your current link buys 5 years down the road, and that they may hurt you then for what you do now. Upon hearing that I said something like "less than 5 years ago I bought spammy links and if I did not I probably wouldn't be speaking here right now". That got a cheer from the crowd. Who wants to be worried about what Google thinks or does 5 years from now? That is no way to innovate or take marketshare from current market leaders.
Reviewing Result Quality
When engineers view your site they don't just look at "if you have a few spammy links" but they try to consider the quality of user experience and the ratio of clean links to dirty links. If your site is good and ranks for years then you are going to get many natural links that dwarf any spammy links that were part of your site launch.
Building a Real Business
If your business model is entirely reliant on Google 5 years from now, your user experience is sub-par, and you haven't built up any brand equity after ranking for 5 years then there was not much effort put into building a legitimate business, and it deserves to fail. But the sites that rank get self reinforcing exposure. If SEO is part of your brand building and site building strategy you simply can not sit around waiting for the rankings to come in.
Inferior Sites Ranking #1
It is easy to lack objectivity when talking of the quality of your site, but in some fields I compete in, many of the top ranked competing sites are ran by people buying a slew of spammy links and pointing them at their (quite obviously) English second language sites. Because they rank, those sites get some number of self reinforcing links. If I did nothing but create great content they would still outrank my site. You have to buy marketshare in one way or another (public relations, AdWords, link buying) if you are trying to gain marketshare and your market is competitive.
Who Buys Links & Uses Push Marketing to Buy Marketshare?
That does not mean that I am an advocate of bad user experience or poor quality content, but if you care about SEO and have a new site in an old market, user experience and content quality are not enough unless you do some push marketing at launch. AOL sent out millions of spammy CDs to market their service.
• Google pushes their logo onto ads they distribute all over the web, has the largest push ad network on the web, has some of the dirtiest domain traffic partners (many cybersquatters), recommend infidelity, and bundle Google Checkout usage with lower ad prices and free links.
• Yahoo! has an in house SEO team and a few years ago Yahoo! was one of the leading link buyers.
• IAC buys a ton of links and aggressively cross links their sites.
• Microsoft has got in trouble for launching new products by bundling them with their old products and steals traffic by sending seobook.om traffic to their live search product.
• Monster.com owns a ton of thin lead generation sites.
• eBay pays affiliates to spam Google.
• One of Google's large ad distribution partners tried setting up a deal with me to rank their ads in Google's search results using aggressive black hat spammy techniques, in which I declined to participate in.
We Don't Write the Algorithms (or Hand Edit Search Results)
As an SEO you simply give the engines what they want. Looking at what they rank and how they market their sites gives you better insights for how to rank than blindly trusting the tips they give you to prevent you from ranking and suggesting you buy their ads. All of the web portals you know and love use push marketing to build their businesses. Why shouldn't you?
Comments
About the Author:
Aaron Wall is the author of SEO Book, a dynamic website offering marketing tips and coverage of the search space, free SEO videos, and free SEO tools. He is a regular conference speaker, partner in Clientside SEM, and publishes dozens of independent websites.
|
