I recently got asked if I wanted to make a post flaming a bunch of people for buying links for SEO from sites that obviously do not pass any link juice. I decided not to because there would be no value add to doing so and I would just be making many people angry.

If you are trying to build a profitable and sustainable brand it is much easier to talk about how smart people are rather than how dumb we are. When you are negative it cuts directly into your sales. Not only does it lower your immediate sales (you can see it in the conversion rate numbers), but it also sacrifices a portion of your authority and credibility (future distribution and sales), while drawing a cynical following that is unlikely to buy much of anything (beyond a good conspiracy theory, at least). As an added bonus, if you get too many cynical people in your community they will also prevent others from wanting to join it. Perceived success or failure becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

When I posted about some of the hand editing Google does, even though that is good information for SEOs to be aware of, it caused my sales to drop because some people thought the goal was a personal vendetta:

I have been reading your blog for about 6 months now, and there has been a major step change in your post's tone. They have gone from useful idea driven content to rants about Google. Be careful the blog isn't twisted in to your personal vendetta as I'm sure you will see a big change in your audience as a result.

The reason there was a step change in what I posted about was because my experience had a step change. Knowing Google wiped away 10,000+ organic backlinks to one of your sites would probably change your perspective as well, especially if you literally had built 10,000+ clean links.

I kept pounding away at the important and non-consistent issues I felt about Google as I thought it through (manual editing coupled with a lack of respect for copyright, and how that game hurts many sites by holding back their true potential by helping them become addicted to Google). I believe in principals enough to kill my income in the process. Naive or smart? Depends on the goal I guess.

It is pretty hard to improve Google's SEO policies from a single SEO blog, or think that posting a personal vendetta will do much other than hurt your sales, but if you think something is unjust and mention it then maybe people with more authority start talking about it, and eventually what you do not like has a chance to change.

At the SES organic listing forum Danny Sullivan said

Your pain is well understood and shared by many people. It's frustrating. We've waited many years for this but they're focused on video copyright theft right now. All those issues on YouTube now are applicable to webpages. Aaron Wall had a good rant where he poked at Google and said they don't care about copyright. The good news is that a lot more people are being vocal about duplicate content, so maybe we'll get better tools in the future to verify the original source of the information.

So that is a start, but perhaps my formatting could have been a bit better to have a stronger impact.

There are many ways to deliver a message. Take John Andrews's Understanding the Google... the post is great. It offers a significant amount of well structured great advice, but due to the negative tone of it, it probably isn't going to spread too far:

Is Google 'right' in it's approach to the web? Is Google 'just' in it's delivery of the carrot and the stick? Is Google 'fair' in the way it operates? None of that matters to the search marketer/SEO. If these attacks are funded as diversions to keep Google busy or otherwise threaten it's dominance, I understand. But if you're interested in ranking well in Google, this is all nonsense. You need to get to know Google, and listen to what Google says. You don't need to agree, and please, stop whining.

Who wants to spread the message Google owns the web, and if you don't like the way they do it you can go f*ck yourself? Not many, I am guessing. And even if that was not the intent of his post, some people will view it that way because of the structure.

For as many people as there are that hate Digg and social media crap, why does this manifesto video only show links from a couple dozen real sites?

Does spreading a hate message sell? Not likely. All it does is give people more fuel to spread hate messages about you when you slip up, especially as you get more popular, and when your philosophies ever change, which they will as you get more exposure.

It is too easy to get lost in a fight of fighting for the sake of fighting. Even if you are right, it really doesn't matter if you express it in a way that cuts your income in half and has you focused on flames instead of product features.

Even companies like Apple can't keep secrets or prevent their latest gadgets from getting hacked. If your market is competitive (and if it is worth being in, it probably is) there is (or will soon be) someone who talks about every day as though the sun is a bit brighter than the last. It is hard to compete with that unless you can format messages in a similar packaging.

When everyone recycles each other's content it all comes down to who has the best analogies and biggest hopes. Who believes in an idea enough to get others to believe in them enough to spread their view of the world (or at least their view of their market)? Build people up and they will be proud to syndicate your message.

Look at Frank Schilling in the domain market, or Seth Godin on marketing. Compare those to the tone of Threadwatch. Threadwatch could build buzz, but could it ever sell anything?

If a message has positive hooks it is much more likely to spread quickly. In 3 years Tal Ben-Shahar's Harvard course on positive psychology went from 8 students to over 900 students, largely due to word of mouth marketing.

It is much easier to spread stories, build a brand, and sell stuff if you are talking up positive things. It is much harder to do so if you are too crass and/or too cynical. Ultimately you still have to be comfortable with what you are doing, but there is a noticeable tax on honesty unless it is well structured or generally positive in nature.

I hope this post didn't sound too stupid, and please send in love or hate using the form below. ;)

In an SES panel yesterday Matt Cutts claims paid links pollute the web ,while he advocates off topic link bait as a useful search marketing strategy. Michael Gray and Greg Boser are a bit more honest:

Link Baiting, what Google’s suggest as link building strategy, is as egregious if not worse for relevancy than paid links - viral content of such an off-topic nature should not help your rankings and is more “polluting” than relevant paid links.

Linkbaiting is Expensive, Time Consuming, and Unpredictable

The reasons search engineers advocate link baiting are:

• it is expensive

• it is time consuming
• the results are hard to predict
• it requires social connections
• it provides off topic low value traffic
• it typically creates content of limited commercial value (other than the ability to pull in links to rank other pages for stuff they did not have enough relevancy or authority to merit ranking for)
• the valuable results can take a while to show
• it often undermines the credibility of the source doing it (by allowing people to think of information from certain sources as link bait, which is a derogatory classification term)
• many companies have restrictions that prevent them from doing it

Because of the above reasons, the technique of link baiting is outside the reach of most webmasters. Since few people can do it, it is highly unpredictable, time consuming, and expensive OF COURSE that is the only way search engineers recommend you build links. They might even like you to believe that almost all links are acquired that way. The more brutally tough it is to build your SEO strategy the more appealing AdWords ads look.

Shopping Search? Try AdWords!!!

If you can't buy links to rank, then some irrelevant old sites and marginably relevant articles on authoritative domains (that typically gained their link based authority before Google polluted the link graph with AdSense and NoFollow) gets to clog up the organic search results, and the only way people can find commercially relevant results is if they look at Google's AdWords ads.

May I Lend You a Hand?

It gets worse when you think about the uneven policing of the search results, where engineers hand edit small webmaster sites out of the search results (even ones that get free unrequested links from the US Coast Guard and US embassy), and look the other way while large corporations (which have large AdWords budgets) OWN the entire Google search result page for some keywords.

The Death of Organic Links

A mainstream media magazine did a spread on one of my friend's websites, where my friend gave them virtually all the content for the article, and they refused to link to my friend's site in the article because they felt it would be too promotional. Sorry, you already sent out 100,000 magazines with the article in it. You already were too promotional. Sadly, that is just one more example of the death of organic links caused by Google's fearmongering.

Optimize Your Account: Pay Us More

I tried Google's AdWords Campaign Optimizer yesterday. It kept telling me to increase my budget for link buying.

If I have a blind bid that is too high would it tell me to lower that bid? Nope. A search marketing campaign is only properly optimized if it sends more money to Google, which is the problem with the field of SEO. Google doesn't get a cut of the action. The organic results have yet to be properly optimized.

Why Waste a Breathe Scaring People Unless the Intent is to Lie or Deceive?

From Rand's blog post about the links SES session:

Matt also says that it's very difficult to buy paid links effectively as a business or as a search marketer because Google does such a good job detecting and eliminating the value of those links.

How often do you hear Matt Cutts droning on about duplicate page titles or stuffing your meta keywords tag? You don't, because they are no longer effective.

Google would not be trying to brainwash webmasters about links so often if paid links didn't work. The problem with paid links is they work too well.

Who is Getting Paid?

To properly understand search marketing you have to understand that the fight over search spam has NOTHING to do with result relevancy. The label of spam is only applied if the wrong company gets paid.

If it is Google getting paid, feel free to sell high yield investment scams, or preteen sex ads. They have no problem syndicating those messages all over the web, as long as they are getting paid.

Google even recommends you go out and buy text links. As an SEO, I trust the SERP more than the engineer. When Google engineers lie publicly to push their business model it doesn't bode well for the future of that company or the future of the web.

Outside of hand edits, most search engine relevancy and trust scores come from looking at third party votes. You don't even have to be a subject matter expert to get tons of traffic if you can just come up with ideas that get authoritative channels talking about you. If you are good at public relations that will be reflected in the search results, both directly and indirectly. Trusted sites that link to you flow trust your way. Even if Google decides to manually edit your site out of the search results, you still have a defensible stream of traffic if you obtained coverage on high authority websites.

Those visitors are going to be hard to monetize unless the other site was reviewing your products or services, but many of those visitors may still link to your site or help push your brand in front of other people. If you have a strong affiliate program or a large set of legitimate organic mentions you don't need search engines.

A site of mine that got hand edited was mentioned in LifeHacker about a year ago. So far today that mention sent 22 visitors. Those visitors are highly qualified since they likely searched on a search engine or via LifeHacker's internal search, found that page on LifeHacker, read that page, then clicked through to my site.

The key with building up a strong link profile on trusted sites is to think about your idea from the perspective of creating something that is useful, wrapped in a story that has a self spreading mechanism, and biasing it to the target audience which is going to spread your message.

Conversation is the #1 signal of quality to search engines. That may change at some point, but for it to do so search engines have to try to change human behavior that has been built, marketed, and reinforced for thousands of years.

As high authority sites attract brand advertisers many of their owners look for ways to create additional pageviews to further scale their businesses. I offered a few tips on how to do that here, but an annoying trend that has recently swept across the web is turning external links into internal links.

If you look at blog mentions on Technorati it is hard to get to the page actually linking to you. Technorati mixes in outbound links and Technorati profile pages without differentiating between the two. Some people are also creating thin sister sites, using bait and switch linking. The Wikipedia practice of link hoarding is just starting to spread. How long until the mainstream media companies create thin review sections and start publishing pages or stubs about everything?

Wikipedia can cross link just about everything and look legitimate with it because they are non profit. Independent webmasters have to be more focused if they are trying to create profitable websites. Navigation can be nearly useless and spammy looking, or with a few minor tweaks it can look legitimate and well categorized. Compare the following two examples:

navigation 1

Seen On a Farm
cows
milk
pickup trucks
etc
etc
etc

vs

navigation 2

farm animals
cows
chickens
pigs
etc

dairy products
milk
cheese
yogurt
etc

farm equipment
tractors
pickup trucks
etc

The first navigational scheme is something you might see on the common AdSense website. Each page is not connected to any of the others by any trait other than carrying AdSense ads.

The second navigational structure looks less spammy and more useful. In addition to looking more credible and being easier to use, it also has headings focused on relevant keywords, which can link to related category pages. This allows the site to focus link weight on core topical phrases and pick up on mid tier keywords not covered by a more haphazard navigational scheme that uses generic words unrelated to the way searchers search.

If you think ahead when planning out your navigation it also makes site expansion a breeze. For example, if you later add turkeys to the farm animals category it can be grouped with chicken under a poultry category.

Good internal navigation should be logical, easy to follow, and reflect your keyword theme.