The Battle Between Good and Evil! (Link-Wise)

Many people throughout the SEO world will readily agree that link building is easily the most important facet of SEO.  Since 1997 when Google first began to institute the incorporation of inbound links  to represent ‘references’, SEOs have been working to unravel all of the aspects of this impressive initiative.  After 14 years this issue has been dissected, improved, re-dissected and morphed once again, as is the case with most major algorithm alterations.  As it stands now there exists a school of thought that can roundly agree on major principles of Links and the Page Rank they seem to be ordered by.  One of the last questions out there is can ‘Bad Links’ (that is Links from Blacklisted sites or sites with spam ratings) be detrimental to a website.

The short answer here is yes.  If you take part in terrible spam link sites, ridiculous amounts of reciprocal link trades, paid links and the like, you will certainly see a hit to your rankings.  However, this exercise in logic invariably delivers the thinker to a seemingly existential paradigm.  That is, if bad links hurt sites, why not adopt the much easier strategy of creating horrible blacklisted sites and from there send armadas or terrible inbound links to your competitors, leaving an easy road to the top of the SERPs and untold piles of gold! Well, aside from the obvious “eye for an eye leaves everyone blind” scenario this creates, the short answer here is no.

“But Tom! In your first paragraph you said a bad link will hurt you! But in your second paragraph, you say that strategy wouldn’t work? What gives, huh!?”  Well friend, at first glance it would have appeared you caught me, hoisted by my own petard! But nay, this is not the case.  The most indisputable evidence I can offer is that this tactic doesn’t appear to be used in any capacity by the black hat community.  If it worked it would likely be common knowledge and used indiscriminately to debase good sites.  However, for the sake of argument let’s say you’re the type of SEOs who can’t let Google be responsible to safeguard you against all sorts of bumps in the middle of the night.  Well you too can relax now that Google has created a place for you to yell from the mountaintop that this link or that link was not your doing.  By taking spam links, or links you don’t want away from the equation Google is again giving more power (and onus) to the Webmaster to make this happen.  It’s most likely a good exercise, but not one worth using a lot of time on.  Your main concern should still be link building, and not perusing your Webmaster Tools to ensure that you’re not being spammed.  In fact, the easiest way to go about this is monitor your Google Feed (which you should be doing anyways) and whenever you see something suspicious en mass that’s a pretty good indication this may have happened to you and you can quickly resolve the situation.

Hope it was helpful folks, I am a blogger AMA.

Linkbuilding: How to Get it Done in the Era of the Scraper Site

When Google first announced their Panda algorithm update, the entire SEO world held their breath to see just what was going to be 'punished'.  Now that the dust has settled and the algorithm has worked its magic on a majority of the rankings, the web is buzzing with the ramifications the update has brought on.  Aside from a few websites being unfairly punished (and Google making amends) the biggest beef is that scraper sites such as the Huffington Post and Drudge Report are outranking the individuals who originally created the content.  This development is rather large as it leaves the ethically challenged scraper sites to benefit from monetized positions in the SERPs while the real authors are left to suffer through less traffic despite the suthenticity of their reporting.

In some cases I personally find this to be abhorrent as those who dare drop into a Libya or Somalia to describe a hellish warscape should likely be the ones rewarded by advertisers and not Arianna Huffington, but alas , that isn;t how the web works.  The bigger question is, should a smaller site work to create great infographics, content, and article marketing if a bigger fish can just re-post it to their own page with minimal credit to the author?  I do believe Google is likely to fix this as it tends to fly in the face of their corporate ethos, but for the time being the daily results are real, and I would estimate infuriating to smaller media outlets looking to compete with the larger sites by beating them to the punch on stories.  If Google's updates have removed a major incentive to these organizations to pound the pavement, than in theory the entire web is going to lose out on a lot of great content. 

As a link building specialist myself, this new update and the corresponding rise in scraper sites has given pause to my article marketing efforts.  If those articles can be usurped by these bigger sites, and furthermore not include my bio box, than there is little incentive for me to aid another website with great content I will never be able to realize any true value from.  I doubt it will stay this way for long, I have however looked to adding inbeds to the actual content, either an inforgraphic or quiz etc.

However, the best way to avoid this scraping and still receive the gold standard of links (an inbound link from the body of an article with good anchor text).  By contacting the more respected industry journals and magazines, you can create an opportunity to be a guest blogger (if your content is good).  Do not present this as an idea unless it is something you really believe in and are prepared for a professional periodical to take you seriously.  This is a time consuming practice, but it does avoid scraping and furthermore provides a strong boost back to your site which would likely take you longer t ogain through three way exchanges and more. 

Now since Google is also beginning to incorporate the social media networks into their search results this can be an icredibly quick way to disseminate links which flow directly to the source (if you set up your networks correctly). 

What are some ways that you guys are creating strong inbound links from strong sources?