Stupid link building ideas for amateurs

There is a new linking strategy in town. Some pretty smart people have been trying it out and many not-so-smart people are endorsing it. I’ve seen several variations on the strategy over the past few months but they all share several characteristics.

You review my blog, I’ll review your blog

Here’s how the new linking strategy works: you write blog reviews on your blog and ask the reviewed blogs to link to your blog.

Just tonight I saw one blog advise people not to include more than 30 blog reviews in any one post “to avoid looking like a link farm” (Definition: A link farm is any group of Web sites where every member in the group links to every other member in the group).

There is nothing wrong with reviewing other blogs, but if you’re just trying to get links you’re risking your credibility with people like me, complete and total strangers, and search engines by engaging in such tricks and games. If you want to game the search engines, then your best strategy is not to tell people how you do it.

Stupidity is its own reward and every smart person on Earth does something stupid at least once in a while. If we could look forward with the perfect vision of hindsight, we’d never get anywhere for fear of making all those mistakes we can’t yet learn from.

In my opinion, if people want to build links through blog reviews they shouild leave the cookie-cutter instructions on how to play the game out of their posts. They should not tell people why they are reviewing other blogs. Just share your reviews, one blog post at a time, and watch the links roll in. Of course if you’re reviewing popular blogs that already have thousands of reviews you probably won’t be perceived as much of a resource.

I review Web sites all the time. I link to Web sites all the time. I get links all the time. But I don’t ask or tell people how to link back to me. I rarely tell people I have reviewed their sites or linked to them. That’s just an invitation for trouble because inevitably once you show people you’re willing to give them links and tell them they’ll come back for more.

At least that is what happened to me a few years ago. I had enough of that crap after like two months. I’m not here to be your link spam daddy. Go earn some decent links by creating content worth reviewing.

So consider this post my request that you stop polluting your otherwise perfectly good blog with sham link-swap reviews. You know who you are.

Join The News Blog Copy Crowd

I expect spammers and script kiddies to scrape the news results. I don’t expect people who actually type content into their blogs to waste my time like that. The “copy and paste and spread the news so others may do the same and the linking continues” blog trick is so lame I can’t begin to name how many high-powered SEO blogs do just that.

Just because the big blogs squander their audience loyalty on mindless posts doesn’t mean you’re going to get high PR links from DIGG and TechMeme by doing the same thing. Those people earned the privilege of being lazy uninformative news copycats by — well, actually, I don’t know what they did to become SEO bigwigs. Maybe they go to conferences and attend the after-hours parties or something.

If you want my attention you had better do more than just mention news I’ll be getting from a real news site. Comment on it with at least 2 paragraphs’ worth of opinion. Show me 200 words of politely worded commentary that doesn’t try to shock me, infuriate me, alienate me, or show me that you are more arrogant and egotistical than me (you can’t possibly be that arrogant and egotistical).

And don’t even hope that I will consider you a resource by linking to the blog where you found the news first. I’ll tell you what I do on those RARE occasions when I repost news I found on a blog: I go find the original source and link to THAT. I am NOT going to send my readers to some cheap-assed blog whose writer is too lazy to do something original.

Give Cheap Advice You Never Tried For Yourself

If Fantomaster links to my blog and tells people I have a pretty good post, I’m going to believe him. The guy was answering my humble, basic questions back when I was just learning this business.

If you tell me I wrote a good post, who are you to be telling me what a good post is? Think about that. Why should I believe you?

Now, most people are typically willing to give a stranger some credibility up front. The Internet is filled with bullshit that misleads people. People are led down the garden path every day. Sometimes we pay the $19.95 just to see what the stupid ebook behind all the endlessly scrolling advertising spam pages is really about (it ain’t worth the money — trust me).

But why do people think they should repeat advice and ideas on their blogs that they read elsewhere? It’s one thing to give praise. It’s another thing thing to say, “Hey, here is an idea you can try” if you haven’t used it yourself. If you’re actually providing services to customers, do you call them up and say, “Joe! I just heard about this great reciprocal link service — you only pay $500 a month!”?

Wouldn’t Joe ask if you have tried the service yourself? Maybe you know a few Joes who are stupid enough to do whatever you tell them, but my customers want to know I’ve got their best interests at heart.

I try a lot of stuff I never write about. The stuff I do write about works…and I can stand behind what I write because I use that advice myself. I’m sick of finding “SEO blogs” that offer great tips I was sharing years ago. Worse, I’m sick of finding “SEO blogs” where the writers don’t share their own experiences, or take a stab at analyzing another Web site without hope of reward — in short, I think an SEO blog should — I don’t know — maybe discuss search engine optimization.

Is that asking too much?

If you don’t know enough to teach me something new, stop posturing. Tell me how you experimented with something I did five years ago. You may feel like you have nothing to offer but I might just be interested enough to read all the way to the end of your post. Maybe I’ll give you an occasional link for trying out stuff regardless of whether I agree with all your conclusions. It’s never too late for me to learn from someone who hasn’t been doing this as long as I have.

The difference between a real SEO blog and a fake SEO blog is not measured in how many links you can drum up. It’s measured in the amount of respect people grant you. I’ll take Halfdeck’s super-optimistic analyses over many “key industry leaders” and their half-witted SEO advice any day.

At least I feel Half is actually trying to do something other than write cheap link bait that looks like nothing better than cheap link bait. And believe me, that is high praise in an industry where I am known to look down my nose at many of my peers.

What’s The Best Link Building Advice?

Link building is not search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is not link building. If you want to be an SEO you have to know how to do more than rub two links together.

There are three kinds useful of links: Those links that drive traffic, those links that tell the search engines about content worth indexing, and those links that tell people and search engines which content is the most important.

If you just want Web site traffic you don’t need to optimize for search. You can get plenty of traffic through links, either by buying them or by earning them. Or you make them yourself if you have access to the right traffic-producing sites.

If you want to use links in search engine optimization you have to get your head out of the bullshit long enough to realize that linking is about 10% of the business. Not 90%. Not 50%. 10%. The majority of Web sites do not need more than a few dozen links at most.

If you’ve got 100+ links pointing to your Web site and you’re not competing for a hyperoptimized query like real estate, travel, pornography, etc. you need to re-evaluate what you’re doing. You should be happy with 100 links in most queries. You can provide yourself with an endless supply of perfectly useful, value-passing, rank-boosting, search-optimizing links through your own content.

You don’t need to game the search engines with snarky blog posts. Leave that to the professional spammers and SEO industry leaders. They’re professionals. They’ve been doing that for years. You’re way behind the curve.

I read a blog post earlier today that said “the old tricks are still the best tricks”. I don’t agree. What I do agree with is “the old, time-proven methods of acquiring meaningful, value-setting links are the still the best”.

Do you understand what I mean by “value-setting”? It ain’t got nothing to do with PageRank, either internal or external.

Offering your own definition for “value-setting links” would, in my opinion, provide the SEO community with something new to chew on.

‘Nuff said.