Brett Tabke closed down his Buddy Links program many years ago, stating the following:

You must ask yourself why sites would join BL in the first place? Because they couldn't get listed in the search engines. That left us at times "bottom" feeding.

Broad Based Reciprocal Links Don't Work:

In spite of Matt Cutts mentioning how reciprocal links were hurting people some of my friends were still making the mistake of being too reliant on link trades, creating obvious links pages. One of my friends hired someone who did nothing but link swaps, and, in the process, prevented my friend from ranking for anything in Google other than one 7 word phrase.

Why Some People Still Think They Do:

I recently posted about how some sites engaged in broad based reciprocal linking are killing themselves in Google. The comments on that post were entertaining. After listening to some guy who goes by the name DomainDrivers comment on and on about reciprocal linking being an effective promotional technique I came to realize the disconnect which prevented him from believing the truth

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair

And then some people look at a portion of the market and want to believe that what is easy for them to replicate is the answer to their problems. Kirby made an excellent blog comment about why many people read the market wrong:

The debate on reciprocal links wont end for a few reasons.

First, the rules are not evenly applied. Older sites that have built up a degree of trust with aged links will get a way with more.

Secondly, it varies from industry to industry. With real estate, there exists a perception that since the space has lots of competitors, it is therefore competitive. Not true.

Do reciprocal links work in this space? Absolutely. The reason, however, is not because of the value of these links, but because its the primary tool of the majority of sites in this space. It tends to boil down to winning a race of mediocrity. Will they win in a truly competitive space? No.

Take a site and get a handful of good quality links with only a small percentage of reciprocal links and it will beat sites like domain drivers' clients hands down.

A Life of Finite Resources:

And the problem with reciprocation is not one associated with the web. The web is just a reflection of the real world, and the problems associated with reciprocation are that each of us have finite resources, finite attention, and a finite lifespan.

Your PageRank, your authority, your reach, ... they are all finite. Chop it up and trade it again, but eventually you are just going to create weird footprints.

Do Reciprocal Links Build Brands?

On that same thread a person who signed their name as being associated with Links Manager stated the following:

Reciprocal linking should be conducted as a BRANDING function.. never as an SEO function.

But you don't build a brand by trading links. You build a brand by promoting things you like and having people who like you promote you. It is much easier to do this if you allow others to fill in your holes where they are passionate.

How to Reciprocate:

Hugh recently mentioned a killer quote

I don't bother "networking" anymore, instead, I try to build relationships with people I find interesting, and who I think are doing interesting things. And I make it my mission to help them in any way I can to achieve their mission. I find this much more satisfying, much more honorable, and much more fun. And this is the cool thing about people....When you help them out in this way, they help you out. Not because it's a tit for tat deal, but because both parties are engaged in a mutually beneficial relationship that extends beyond the next favor.

Examples of Ways People Have Helped Me:

One person reformatted my ebook just because they liked it. Another friend recommended an editor that is currently editing it to make the grammar better. Another friend wrote my sales letter. Another friend helped me launch an ad network. Another friend offered to do multivariant testing. Another friend designed my site. Another friend gave me public speaking tips. Another friend became a business partner and sat next to me while I was giving a speech to department heads at a fortune 500 company. My most popular SEO tool (SEO for Firefox) was created by a friend who I knew before I got into the web.

Passion as a Proxy for Value:

If you are hanging around bottom hangers (reciprocal link trading hubs, for example) you are valuing your time at next to nothing and are surrounding yourself with bad ideas. Everything you see or do effects how you perceive the world and how you act. And how you act also determines what and who you attract into your life. If you are passionate then passionate people will enter your life.

You are only as good as the people you surround yourself with. You build a brand by creating friendships with honest people who are doing well, and try to help them do better. I talk to some friends like Andy Hagans, Caveman, and Werty all the time, and they always give me good ideas to help me improve my site and marketing.

When you are passionate about what you do you create value beyond your income. You accumulate friendships, assets, brand value, and market influence which are worth far more than most people realize.

I still trade links sometimes, or just link to friends knowing that they may link back, but most of my link swaps are only representative of friendships, and, to me, that seems the only way to make it worthwhile.

SEO Question: Is a Yahoo! Directory registration worth it? How do I know what directories are worthwhile? What directories should I submit to? Do you have any good site submission tips?

SEO Answer: If you have a business, and are serious about SEO, I generally would recommend submitting your site to the Yahoo! Directory. There are a lot of criteria to consider.

Your Site Name:

If your site name is MyKeywords.com make sure that your site lists your company as My Keywords. Do not run the words together in your logo, in your page title or text, or in the title of your directory submission when submitting your site to important directories. By separating the words in your site name you get better anchor text because the search engine sees the separate words in your links. Descriptive links from trusted editorial sources can be seen as a sign of quality.

If your keywords are not included in your site name, and it would be easy to alter your page title and logo, you may want to consider making some of your keywords as part of your logo design and official looking site name, so that you can get those words in your submission title.

If your keywords do not look like they are part of your official branded site name do not get too aggressive with keyword stuffing unless you are willing to risk a Yahoo! Directory editor editing your business name and potentially giving you less than ideal anchor text.

SERP Analysis:

When I buy quality links I am primarily buying them for either direct traffic or the effect they may have on my Google rankings. So the place to start analyzing category analysis is the search results.

Some sites will rank well based on being deceptive, creative, and spammy, but those rankings will quickly change over time, and those are not the ideal sites to pattern your link profile after. It is better to look at the top ranking related sites which you believe are credible sites that deserve the position.

For example, if you are a retailer of a product, but most of the higher quality top ranked sites in your category are manufacturers, it might make sense to dress up your site and write your directory listing description to make it look more like you are a manufacturer which also sells goods directly rather than just a retailer, that way you can submit your site to a category that lists you alongside.

The co-citation you are buying when you chose a category is a large part of the value of a directory listing.

Site Description:

Write your site description to help reinforce your category selection. Bias it toward making your site sound relevant for the category you want to be listed in. For example, if you want to be listed as a manufacturer and are submitting to a manufacturing category make sure your description says something like manufacturer of ...

Don't put too much hype in your site description. Look at other sites listed in your category to see how they are listed. The main goal of the description is to sell the category placement, and do differentiate your site from other sites listed in your category.

Directory Category Analysis:

There are a few main criteria when considering what directory category to submit your site to.

1. the odds of you being rejected

2. the co-citation value
3. the global link authority of that category (ie: PageRank)
4. the number of listings in your category

The odds of being rejected:
The odds of your site getting rejected from a paid directory for submitting to the wrong category are going to be quite low. For a free submissions or submissions to directories ran by editors, like DMOZ, getting the category selection correct is far more important than with a paid directory.

For a paid directory you probably want to submit to the best category which is reasonably relevant to your site. If they are too liberal with category placement the directory is probably of low quality and not trusted much, but even with high quality directories usually you can fudge it a bit. And, worst come to worst, they will typically list you in the category you belong listed in even if they do not give you the placement you desire most.

Co-citation value:
The co-citation you are buying is a large part of the value you are buying when you buy a directory listing. Consider the types of sites you want to be grouped with from the above SERP analysis section.

Yahoo! paginates the directory category listings pages by popularity, so if there are over 20 listings in your category and your site is new, you may want to spend the $50 to $300 a month it costs to sponsor your category, at least until your site's popularity increases and you are one of the top 20 results in your category.

Category link authority:
Some areas of a directory are over-represented within the overall directory structure, or may be well referenced by external resources. For example, Yahoo! lists the blogs category rather high in their overall category structure. Want another example of a directory category getting a bit of overexposure?

When Yahoo! created their own search engine, their official search engine guidelines linked to their SEO resources category. Hundreds of companies listed in the SEO services category, but there were only about a dozen listings in the SEO resources category.

Number of Links in Your Category:
If your category has less than 20 links then it is clear you will be listed next to the other listings. If your site is new and your category has more than 20 links then you may need to buy a category sponsorship to be featured at the top of the category to get the desirable co-citation.

Two other things to look at with the number of links in your category:

• If you have a top sponsorship position in your category, or if you are bootstrapping it, and your brand is not that strong yet it may be cheaper to rank your category page than to rank your site off the start.

• If your category has few links, or the other listings are not too relevant to your business, do not expect the Yahoo! Directory editors to want to list your site there.

Submitting to Other Directories?

I still think this post from April about web directories and SEO is a good primer for considering the quality of various directories, and how search engines may evaluate them.

A couple things I would add to that post:

• Aged sites and/or sites with clean link profiles which are well trusted in Google are given a bit more leniency on what links may count and how many bad links they can get away with. If you have an aged trusted site you may want to dig a bit deeper for links, but for newer or untrusted sites you are best off just getting links from some of the higher quality directories.

• If you are applying to become an editor at DMOZ, or other volunteer ran directories, make sure you start with a small category and sell topical passion more than you sell your commercial interests in the topic.
• If you submit to a directory which allows multiple deep links with your listing, like Business.com, make sure you consider what pages will earn the most. For example, I have a 600+ page site where about 20% of the earnings come from one page. Getting your top earning pages a few more links can significantly increase their earning potential, but also note that if your deep idea is an uncompetitive niche there might be other links that you can get that will not leave such an obvious roadmap for competitors.
• If your brand or core keywords could commonly be misspelled, like Client Side SEM vs Clientside SEM, you may want to submit your site to a couple average to lower quality directories with misspelled anchor text.

Editorial links are...well, editorial links. Rand recently posted about how all the major search engines were in agreement that they would count links as votes from blog reviews bought through sites like ReviewMe:

Tim [Converse] answered first and said that Yahoo! wouldn't try to pick one post out of twenty or fifty on every blog that might be running advertorials or paid reviews just to stop link value from that particular post. If the engine looked at the site and saw that in general, the outgoing links were of high quality, there would be no discount of link value for paid blog material. Adam from Google agreed, but said little in particular. Vivek from Ask was quick to note that if the link were off-topic, Ask would be likely not to give that link much weight, but I pointed out that most advertisers would buy links from highly relevant blogs, not just for the search engine value, but because they wanted the qualified, relevant traffic from click-throughs as well as branding. Eytan from MSN agreed but didn't expand and when Tim Converse from Yahoo! jumped back in to say that it really wasn't worth an engine's time to going picking out paid links with that granularity, all the other panelists were vigorously head-nodding and verbally agreeing.

And when you think about it, some of the major search engines run automated ad networks and teach publishers to blend ads into the content. Is a blended ad more valuable to readers than an honest editorial review? Doubtful. And even Google tells you to submit your site to the Yahoo! Directory. Is a Yahoo! Directory editor going to do as much of an in depth review of a site as a blogger writing a whole page about it? Doubtful.

A blog which offers honest reviews isn't selling its authority / linkability / credibility any more than a blog which blends ads does. And if the editorial reviews are honest, I think they can be viewed as interactive ads...a type of advertising which adds value to the ads in more ways than you can count (conversation, buzz, branding, and feedback off the top of my head). And, to me, having one ad every few dozen posts looks much nicer than having ads front and center above the content on every page does.

And the review system is self correcting as well. If bloggers make bogus reviews they sell their credibility wholesale, and will lose readers and get flamed in their comments. If they make honest reviews then that is just another source of unique content.

addicted to attention
he kept writing
long after he had anything meaningful to say
posts equal profit

and the worst thing you could do is react
the words are devoid of meaning or truth
not for profit, but he needed to lie
to get sustainable exposure

he grew into his toys
and neeeded new ones
he deserved them
for all his hard work

mindless drones vote on headlines
marketers get links and money
what does it mean to be professional
do the ends justify the means

Is Google just a large ad broker with a search service they can target ads against? Or how might they commoditize many markets? The current trend at Google is that software and storage want to be free. As technology gets cheaper so will Internet access and other forms of communication. Google offers free VoIP and ties it into Gmail, they mentioned making cell phones free via mobile ads, iPods holding all the world's TV in 12 years, and are offering media companies packets of cash to keep it on the web.

Google's main point of profit at the moment is ad sales, which is both highly inefficient and a fraction of what they could do.

Google Checkout:

Google leveraged search as a wedge against which they can sell targeted ads. Right now they are leveraging those ads to try to become a big online payment processor, by including Google Checkout buttons and $10 off coupons in the ads.

They think they can make payment processing faster and more efficient. Ads which have less slippage have greater value. But I seriously doubt that Google would want to stop at just making their ad network more efficient. Why would they?

Google has already launched a coupon program to tie together online and offline marketing, but what if they also attacked the online and offline divide via payment processing? The reason they started online is because that is where they already have leverage. Google talked about not competing with Paypal, but they offered a free month of service to try out Google Checkout for the holidays, and have already extended that holiday promotion another year.

Going Offline:

After they get enough lock-in, don't be surprised if they create a way to track offline transactions.

Most people in the US (and probably around the world) are in debt. Imagine if Google offered a coupon card or credit card. How many people would be willing to use a Google credit card if they offered the lowest interest rates or had other ways they could add value?

How Could Google Add Value?
After a period of charging an initial low interest rate (say 0%) Google could add value by providing health related precautions, related product recommendations, price comparisons, and reviews.

Health Information:
When Google created their Co-op they got many health authorities to participate. What if at the consumer level I could also input data, or I could sign into it when I signed my medical paperwork?

Related Product Recommendations:
Some of Amazon.com's recommendations are spot on. Imagine if Amazon had all their current customer purchase information, recent customer transactions, and were able to add your search history and add media consumption history to that.

Your purchase history, media consumption history, and search history paint a vivid personality profile which must be easy to target ads and product recommendations to.

Price Comparisons:
What if cell phones had product scanners on them? Read John Battelle's the transparent (shopping) society.

Reviews:
Google

• already offers a web comments plugin

• structures data via Google Base, Google co-op, inline suggestions, and Google OneBox
• pulls reviews from other sites for vertical search sites like Google local and Google movies, and
• could probably just gather reviews directly if they wanted to.

Lock In:
If Google gets enough vendors to lock in they will also have the most complete database of where to find things, which will only grow with time due to network effects.

RFID & Inventory Management:

In the video Epic 2014 they sell the case of a Google Amazon tie up, but I think Google will prevent themselves from carrying physical goods (as noted in August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web.), because they do not need to have them to influence the markets, and actually having physical goods may limit their ability to collect market data.

Before locking in consumers with all those features they will try to get many merchants to commit as well. Imagine if Google offered virtually free RFID tracking and inventory management software which helped automate restocking. And, imagine how well they could recommend competing suppliers and offer ads which looked like discounts.

A True Market Maker:

Google could influence what information we are able to find, what ads we see, what publishers are paid for creating content, and grab a cut from any and every point in the supply chain, charging whatever rates they felt comfortable charging. If they could gain that much information they could even use it to trade commodities and derivatives. Who better to trade commodities than the business which is able to turn so many things into commodities?