Linking is an essential part of any SEO campaign – internal linking, content publicity, external linking, etc etc. Eric Ward talks about this in his article linking experts going underground. Eric Ward is one of my favorite speakers and I have learned a lot from him over the years. Linking has been used by many in the industry to make a lot of money. Eric is one of the good guys and has always promoted natural linking which builds brand as well as traffic.
The ‘linking experts’ I am concerned about are those that are only in it for the money. They have helped to make what has always been an essential part of SEO so difficult for those of us who promote sites online.
Any good organic SEO company who gets results has been doing linking for their clients and they have adapted when the algorithm’s have changed. The difference between them and the ‘linking experts’ is that they did not build a business around it and consider it part of SEO – not a separate service. Good linking is an important part of an overall SEO campaign with under performing terms being targeted using online publicity and other linking strategies on a regular basis.
I am not sorry to see the ‘linking experts’ having a hard time right now. Some of them have filled their pockets with money and moved on. What many of them were doing was wrong – and they knew this long before Google ever changed their webmaster guidelines. However, the gullible public did not and the link sellers were laughing all the way to the bank. Selling links for page rank and rankings has always been frowned upon by Google ever since I have been involved in SEO (and I have been around longer than most!)
Linking is not SEO when it is sold as a separate service using tactics that at best are questionable and at worst worthless. Paid text links are a perfect example of this. Call linking what it really is (a part of an SEO strategy) and let’s stop pretending that they are two separate services.
The real results comes when you work with an expert who knows how to combine the two. I do not have an issue working with a ‘linking expert’ as long as the whole linking strategy is in line with the overall big picture.
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February 13th, 2008 at 1:42 am
True linking is not SEO if it is sold as a separate service.!!
February 13th, 2008 at 4:01 am
Good points. There are a lot of “get rich quick” SEO “experts” around. Getting and maintaining good ratings is a combination of good SEO (content, keywords, quality links etc)