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From the article: If your telling the client your doing high quality link building, then buying the cheapest package you can from a link seller, that’s

From the article: If your telling the client your doing high quality link building, then buying the cheapest package you can from a link seller, that’s fraud and in todays world, you can cause serious damage. The mom and pop store that got hit... It is a shame. But: This mom and pop store certainly has their own responsibility. Especially if they rely on Google to keep their business afloat. They are webmasters, and as such should take note of the webmaster guidelines [1]. If they want to outsource being a webmaster, the webmaster they hire should do the SEO hiring and guideline compliance. Having an online business is more than just putting up a website. The webmaster guidelines are fairly clear on these matters: Any links intended to manipulate a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it's best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to "help" you. Yes, to me, this means every "high quality" link building program is suspect from the very start. Getting a high quality backlink from CNN or from 100 low-quality blog sites doesn't change the manipulative nature of these (bought) links. This makes the difference between low-quality and high-quality link building moot. (Google) search is not a black box most make it out to be. SEO is not magic. Make a site accessible and search bots have no problem crawling and indexing your site. Create quality content. Read the webmaster guidelines. Google wants your content to rank on its own merits. Align yourself: simply stop buying link schemes, start writing quality content, and EARN those links. Optimize websites for users (of which searchbots are just a subset). Try inbound marketing and website optimization. [1] http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#38... P.S. I am sick of SEO scumbags too. I am also sick of the blind SEO hate on a start-up site (start-ups often need SEO, yet a lot lack it). Didn't patio11 used to give actionable, and much appreciated advice on these matters? Do we really want to eat the sour grapes from someone banned by Adwords or Google ("Because Google targetted them, because their competitor set them up, because they got hit by those bloody quality updates, because they are not social enough, because they don't buy Adwords, because they don't use blackhat SEO, $insert_other_excuse_for_why_Google_is_required_to_rank_them"). P.P.S: The good SEO's I know often have their own sites they work on, or join an agency to work on big traffic sites. They are not using a cold-call phone team to get their clients, or stay busy optimizing mom and pop stores. This may skew the experiences you have with SEO's in general.

a5seo 14y ago
I agree with you, but everything you say about SEO can be said of PR. The difference is that PR is a more mature field and people understand what it's about. It probably also helps that few have the attitude that they are entitled to news coverage the same way they feel entitled to traffic. So we accept that it's capricious and that someone who knows what they're doing can get results. And that's OK. Anyway, who cares about "blind SEO hate on a start-up site?" It ultimately gets punished by the market. If you hate SEO, great. Make your site hard to crawl chock full of duplicate content and inscrutable urls; don't bother to get authority signals (links) deep and wide; don't make pages that satisfy search intent. Your competitor who DOES will get traction, funding, a better team, and down the road you'll be yet another guy at a bar saying, "Yeah, I used to have a startup... tough racket."
- tripzilch 14y ago
  So, just for a laugh, crazy idea: say I have a site that I don't want to be on the search engines, but I still want people to be able to link to it etc, so no just putting it behind a login, I can do the above? Duplicate all sorts of crappy content, making sure in particular to mention the words "viagra" and "casino" a lot?
  - bones6 14y ago
    Ya you could easily do that and get blacklisted by Google and most USA search engines. Make the text the same color as the background, really tiny in the corner somewhere and spam it up. Though you could simply edit your robots.txt if you don't want to appear on the search engines. At least the ones who respect that. If a link to the site is found by a spider, the cat is out of the bag so to speak. Nothing can put it back in the box.
trevelyan 14y ago
<blockquote> Make a site accessible and search bots have no problem crawling and indexing your site. Create quality content. Read the webmaster guidelines. Google wants your content to rank on its own merits. </blockquote> At risk of sounding bitter, this is really not the best advice to share with any group of startup entrepreneurs who might believe it and stake their business model on it. As with many of us here, I've struggled with this issue for years, and the reality is that Google is a saturated distribution channel that is horrible at identifying quality content that is not heavily branded or pushed in mainstream media. There are ways to tweak the signals, but it usually means having someone working fulltime on spreading word, and smaller teams building good sites often have better things to do than linkbait blogging (something I believe many of us would personally define as poor quality content). And even then this approach simply does not work in highly competitive fields where there is literally a decade of competition over search queries at this point, and competition from highly-funded startups and incumbents.

a5seo 14y ago

I agree with you, but everything you say about SEO can be said of PR. The difference is that PR is a more mature field and people understand what it's about. It probably also helps that few have the attitude that they are entitled to news coverage the same way they feel entitled to traffic. So we accept that it's capricious and that someone who knows what they're doing can get results. And that's OK. Anyway, who cares about "blind SEO hate on a start-up site?" It ultimately gets punished by the market. If you hate SEO, great. Make your site hard to crawl chock full of duplicate content and inscrutable urls; don't bother to get authority signals (links) deep and wide; don't make pages that satisfy search intent. Your competitor who DOES will get traction, funding, a better team, and down the road you'll be yet another guy at a bar saying, "Yeah, I used to have a startup... tough racket."

tripzilch 14y ago
So, just for a laugh, crazy idea: say I have a site that I don't want to be on the search engines, but I still want people to be able to link to it etc, so no just putting it behind a login, I can do the above? Duplicate all sorts of crappy content, making sure in particular to mention the words "viagra" and "casino" a lot?
- bones6 14y ago
  Ya you could easily do that and get blacklisted by Google and most USA search engines. Make the text the same color as the background, really tiny in the corner somewhere and spam it up. Though you could simply edit your robots.txt if you don't want to appear on the search engines. At least the ones who respect that. If a link to the site is found by a spider, the cat is out of the bag so to speak. Nothing can put it back in the box.

trevelyan 14y ago

<blockquote> Make a site accessible and search bots have no problem crawling and indexing your site. Create quality content. Read the webmaster guidelines. Google wants your content to rank on its own merits. </blockquote> At risk of sounding bitter, this is really not the best advice to share with any group of startup entrepreneurs who might believe it and stake their business model on it. As with many of us here, I've struggled with this issue for years, and the reality is that Google is a saturated distribution channel that is horrible at identifying quality content that is not heavily branded or pushed in mainstream media. There are ways to tweak the signals, but it usually means having someone working fulltime on spreading word, and smaller teams building good sites often have better things to do than linkbait blogging (something I believe many of us would personally define as poor quality content). And even then this approach simply does not work in highly competitive fields where there is literally a decade of competition over search queries at this point, and competition from highly-funded startups and incumbents.