For backdrop, read Stephan Spencer’s
Link Economics 101: A Prerequisite For Advanced SEO.
When you focus and practice a specific skill set long enough, one of the unexpected benefits is you become an unintended expert in spotting those with no skills at all. In fact, at this point my bullshit meter is a finely tuned instrument.
More than anything else, I wish the “sellers of the useless” in the link building industry would just go away.
But they don’t.
The frenzy for link building today must be like what I imagine the gold rush was like in the 1800’s. You could probably pick from many different types of gold digging shovels, all claiming to be stronger or better than each other, all making sale after sale after sale. Only after you got to the desert did you realize your shovel handle was made from cheap wood instead of Ash and the blade was stamped, not forged. If only you’d done a little homework first.
In my industry niche, I can spot a bad shovel a mile away, and I’ve saved many a company from making a very expensive link building vendor mistake. Some of the advice I give I am amazed I still have to give period. “Don’t use a company in India to build your links?” Well…duh. “Join the local Chamber of Commerce and get a link on the member section?” Well, yes, of-freeking course. “Don’t buy anchor text links across 47 school newspaper web sites?”
You mean like this pile of crap below? Click for a close up look.
Good God please help me. When was the last time a college kid needed restaurant supplies? Or a limo in Orlando?
I think it’s funny that all over the country school newspaper publishers are wondering why their ad revenue is sky high while the rest of the economy is in the dumps. They think it’s their content, when in fact it’s .edu link chasing morons. And I mean that whether it works or not. It’s crap. Stop it already.
At the same time I’m not so vain as to think I have what everyone needs, because I most definitely do not. But what I do know better than most, perhaps due to longevity, experience, and trial/error is what type of link building approach and service(s) is most suited for any given content deployment scenario.
Call it a link building blueprint.
Every site needs to create a link building blueprint, and whether they create that blueprint in-house or hire someone to create the blueprint for them (like I’ve been doing for oh, two decades), that blueprint needs to be created by someone who understands the complexity and nuance of link building etiology. Every link building blueprint must be 100% custom to the site it was created for, in order to have any long lasting impact.
And sites that have been around a long time need more than a blueprint. They need a link portfolio evaluation and a forward moving strategy that maximizes what they have already, and augment it with all they have missed without knowing they missed it.
I hate to beat this horse, but it is true; every site has specific optimal inbound link potential. Few sites ever reach that potential, because they don’t know what that potential is, or they spend too much time (and money) chasing the wrong types of links. My job is to show them what their site’s true link potential is, and help them get closer to it, even if that means sending them to a provider other than me.
Linkmoses can’t help everyone.
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