Linkblogs Talking Content, Content, Content

Hey Aaron, Thanks for the great link! I was wondering if you agreed with the main points of his blog? When he says 'link development' is dead, does he mean link building? Is one's site's number of incoming links being devalued now compared to older algos?

Also, I would love to hear your thoughts on whether or not you think directories are still a very important tool in getting good SERP's. Thanks for the great link! Take care and happy thanks.

I have it in the back of my mind to start a Spam Blog. That is, a blog about the spam and urban legends and glurge that I receive. I would just forward the email spam directly to the blog.

>When he says 'link development' is dead, does he mean link building?

Take this advice with a grain of salt, but...

In SEO certain techniques have a great ROI and then they get abused and search engines look for ways to discount the techniques.

Meta tag spam, hidden content, keyword repition spam, etc etc etc... and so then it went to links. The link algorithms are forced to evolve...

Many top SEOs do not do much reciprocal linking because there are other SEO techniques that provide better ROI. To some extent some overtly obbious paid links or directory links have largely headed in the same direction in Google...not bringing much pull in the search results.

Although I would note that I see some sites ranking #1 fairly consistantly in Google (short term dip during the Jagger update but popped right back up) primarily due to what I believe having directory links for terms that have a daily traffic value of around $300 to $500 (if they had to buy their traffic via AdWords). Keep in mind that Yahoo! and MSN are probably not as advanced as Google is as scrubbing link quality.

Back to the ROI point...sometimes it is cheaper to create a viral cause or story or some sort of content that draws in the links. If you want to be successful longterm in even a semi competitive niche then most likely you are going to need to have some people reference you even if you do not ask them for links.

>Is one's site's number of incoming links being devalued now compared to older algos?

Well they still have to rank the sites based on something, and for now that something is mainly linkage data.

Google just seems to be getting better at scrubbing link quality.

At the WMW Las Vegas conference Matt Cutts emphasized that they really only want to count editorial votes...not bought links or false votes. Sure some stuff still gets counted (and I see some fairly static sites get crawled far more frequently than they normally would due to buying a few links), but you want to have some quality links.

The two best ways to debate links for quality are:

• Is this a site useful for humans? Is this a vote I would want to count as a search engineer.
• The ease with which the average webmaster can get a link is typically roughly going to be inversely proportional to how valuable a link is.

>Also, I would love to hear your thoughts on whether or not you think directories are still a very important tool in getting good SERP's.

I think they can be a piece of the puzzle, but not the whole thing. A while ago you could get away with them being the whole thing, but longterm I do not see that as being very viable IMHO.

>start a Spam Blog

just what the world needs. More spam! I actually had the same thoughts as well. I actually wanted to create a peir review site that rated the quality of spam. I think I own spammer.in and spamolympics.com, although I have not yet developed the sites much in any real way and probably would not for at least a few years.