LinksManager.com Blog

Let’s start 2013 by ignoring the unending debate over Google’s love-hate relationship with linking, something we haven’t done in this blog since the dawn of the Panda/Penguin era.

Report card-wise, our post Panda/Penguin experience and that of our thousands of LinksManager subscribers has been pretty much overwhelmingly positive.

Many subscribers report seeing their sites rise in the Google returns as formerly higher ranked competitors employing such black hat search-engine optimization scams as buying and automatically harvesting links got dumped.

Still other subscribers, those who responded to the Panda/Penguin challenge by beefing up their site’s content and using LinksManager to add more high quality links and prune some under-performing ones, report improved page rank and return position regardless of what their competitors are doing.

Finally, the great majority of LinksManager users are seamlessly keeping on keeping on. They were happy with their LinksManager-enabled sites search-engine performance before Panda and Penguin and they’re just as happy now.

Happily, only a tiny fraction of our subscribers – less than 10 out of thousands — has gotten one of Google’s infamous “improper linking” emails. We’ve investigated every single one of those cases and in each one the apparent trigger was something done outside of LinksManager. Embedded paid links acquired a few years earlier before the operator knew better, long-forgotten hidden links added by a previous website builder and other such boo-boos.

That’s our story. So-called search-engine-optimization “professionals” whose bread and butter is “earned” by stuffing prospective clients full of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt) have another story. Which all forms the basis for the debate we promised not to have today.

Today … today … we’re going to start the New Year by talking about the roughly 25 billion – yes billion, not million – search queries a month submitted to search engines that candidly admit – without any debate or argument – that quality link exchanges, i.e. reciprocal links, are a major positive factor in their ranking algorithms.

We’re talking, of course, about the world’s number two and number three most popular search engines. Bing and Yahoo. In addition to sharing a common website index, they share the vast bulk of search queries that Google doesn’t get … about 25 billion a month. And unlike Google, they are not shy about admitting their reliance on organic, relevant, ethical reciprocal links as an indication of a site’s quality.

Here’s what they say:

BING: Reciprocal linking (is when) you agree with another website to exchange links. They point one at your site, and you point one at their site … exchanging a link is a solid way to not only gain a trusted inbound link, but potentially to gain direct traffic from the other website. That traffic could easily bring with it more links as those new visitors spread the word about your own website … this essentially means the links are built by people linking to your content because they find value in your content. This is an important signal to a search engine because it is seen as a vote of confidence in the content … organic links such as those are how the Internet became a “web”.

YAHOO: Yahoo! strives to provide the best search experience on the Web by directing you to high-quality and relevant web content in response to your search query. Pages Yahoo! wants include original and unique content of genuine value, pages designed primarily for humans, with search engine considerations a secondary concern, (pages with) hyperlinks intended to help people find interesting, related content …

To sum up, a robust, white-hat linking presence – such as that empowered by LinksManager –cannot harm your Google ranking and, based on our users’ experiences, will help it.

If you don’t believe white-hat linking CAN’T HARM YOUR GOOGLE RANKINGS, read Google’s official quality guidelines.  Only “linking schemes” and “excessive” linking are penalized and both of those things are impossible to do it you use LinksManager and follow our simple, search-engine friendly recommendations.

Not having a robust, white-hat linking presence, on the other hand, will definitely lower your site’s search-engine appeal with Bing and Yahoo.

All of which raises a question.

But before we ask it we’ll throw another factoid into the fray. According a recent Forrester Research report, approximately 30 percent of e-tail shoppers are no longer initiating their queries via ANY search engine. They’re starting at Amazon.com. Toss in another 20 or more percent that begin directly at eBay and the trend of people moving away from the chaos (largely caused by Google’s favoring directory and other junk sites in its returns) of search engine returns to find what they want is obvious.

Which brings us, after 845 tedious words, to our first question of 2013. At a time when search engines in general are losing a significant number of “I want to buy” queries to dedicated shopping sites, can you really afford to write off the sales potential inherent in 25 billion searches a month by ignoring Bing and Yahoo in your SEO strategy?

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[houskeeping note:  Our blog here at LinksManager is missing the cosmetics wrapper because we are about to release a new version of the LinksManager public website - pardon our dust!]

Dear E-business Colleagues:

If there’s one thing we at LinksManager have, it’s historical perspective. Over the 14 years we’ve been around we’ve seen Yahoo fall and Google rise. We’ve seen dialup modems consigned to the Smithsonian archives and observed Microsoft launch and re-launch search engines that somehow never quite seemed to ignite.

Will Bing be the one to finally catch fire? Stay tuned for another 14 years and maybe we’ll know.

Fourteen years may seem like an Information Age eternity, but it isn’t forever. Site owners were exchanging links to drive traffic and deliver value-added content to web surfers long before LinksManager got here. Long before Google, which coincidentally launched at virtually the same moment as LinksManager, got here.

Please, people, please note that point and note it well. Reciprocal linking was an established, powerful, basic enabler of web commerce long before evaluating links to determine search engine rankings was a gleam in Google’s founder’s eyes.

And mark this point as well, LinksManager was conceived and brought to market when Yahoo ruled the search-engine roost with an iron fist. Yahoo’s bots, and virtually every one of its competitors neither knew nor cared about links. They based their ranking decisions on keywords and meta content.

So here’s a New Year’s greeting for all the revisionist historians, in and out of Google, who claim reciprocal linking in general and LinksManager in particular were created to influence search engine rankings:  You are wrong.

LinksManager was invented to simplify and streamline the mind-numbing tasks of manually managing links. It was never designed or intended to be primarily used as an SEO tool for the simple reason that SEO had nothing to do with linking when we were developing the program.

LinksManager is the only editor-based link management service on the Web that doesn’t allow full duplex linking. It is the only link management service with a registered US patent for an editor-based application (USPTO 7,082,470) that is virtually impossible to compromise, that simply does not allow users to automatically harvest and post links, to participate in multi-tiered linking scams, or engage in other black-hat SEO practices.

LinksManager exists to make it easier, for example, for wedding photographers and floral designers to recommend each other’s services to their customers via a simple hyperlink.  A link exactly the same as the ones that links Delta to American Express and American Express to Delta.

A link between two sites where the owner/operators know and respect each other.  A link which benefits both the site owners and their end users, a benefit which only the Web can deliver.

A link the lensman and the florist have every legal and ethical right to establish, a link they should be free to add to their pages without having to dread the arrival of threatening emails – or worse – from Google.

Here’s a promise to any potential whistle blowers at Google.  If you’d like to explain the difference in “legitimacy” between an Adwords link to a florist on a wedding photographer’s site and an exchanged link to the same florist on the same page, we will strictly protect your anonymity.

So here’s a post-Christmas gift to you Larry, and you Serge, and you, too, Eric.  It’s an invisible picture but, if you’re honest enough to look for it, you’ll be able to see it your mind’s eye.  It’s a portrait, a snapshot of you and your statements of net worth as they might look today if you hadn’t had reciprocal links to build your search engine and hang your patents on.

Because there were a ton more links exchanged than back links in those primitive times and Google’s rise to supremacy was largely fueled by its reliance on those links, more than keywords, as a ranking factor.

So now that you’ve built America’s fifth largest company on the backs of small and medium sized websites that practice linking, you’ve declared a war of intimidation against honest, ethical, relevant link exchanges, the very practice you exploited on your way to becoming billionaires.

It seems very fitting, somehow, that we’re posting this shortly after Christmas.  The small business internet community, all those sites which derive a substantial part of their traffic from links to other compatible sites, shared their bounty with you in the same way Native Americans shared theirs with the Pilgrims.  Guess we all know how grateful the Great White Fathers were about that, don’t we?

Besides our birthdate, LinksManager and Google have one other thing in common, we were both established to make money without doing evil.  Google states this explicitly in its guiding principles, we do so implicitly in our Code of Ethics.  We are still living by our Code, Google, at least in this one instance, has abandoned theirs.

With statements and threats that blur — erase, actually – the line between relevant, traffic-generating links and spammy black hat links established solely to try and manipulate search engines, Google IS using intimidation to bully website owners into questioning whether or not they should establish even the most obviously legitimate, productive links.

And that bullying IS evil.  Gravely evil.  Evil enough to threaten the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of webtrepreneurs who can’t survive solely on search-engine driven traffic, don’t have the money for pay-for-play ad campaigns and depend on exchanged links to generate enough sales to keep them off the red-ink side of the ledger.

Webtrepreneurs who participate in no linking schemes, who personally examine and approve every link posted on their sites, who have never bought or sold a link in their lives.  Webtrepreneurs whom Google has intimidated into believing that continued use of any kind of link exchange, relevant and appropriate as it may be, is going to negatively impact their search rankings.

Look, all you people at Google, we’ve just said that you are doing evil.  And you are. What we didn’t say is that you are doing it intentionally.

You represent a giant company far removed from the day to day struggles of mom-and-pop website operators.  You know and understand the subtle distinctions that exist between what you sometimes seem to say, what you really mean and what your algorithms are actually looking for.

But the rest of the ecommerce world can’t perceive such nuances.  All webmasters have to go on is the basic meaning of the words you use and those words … the ones you use when talking about ALL linking, not just “black hat” linking, have become pretty scary over the past couple of years.

So if that’s not your intent you can fix it – and stop doing unintended evil – by adding one short sentence to your Webmaster Quality Guidelines.

It could go right after the second paragraph on your “Link Schemes” page and it would say something like this:

Non-manipulative links established primarily to facilitate commerce between sites with mutually relevant content will not be considered part of a link scheme.

Thank you.

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Finally, at long last, Google has said the truth about all those warning emails and penalties for sites having alleged “unnatural links” in a public forum where everyone can see, hear and comprehend it.

And that truth is simply this: All – or at least the vast majority — of those warning letters and penalties that have been making website operators either ill because they’ve gotten one or sick because they’re paranoid they’re going to get one relate directly and only to spammy, paid, and low-quality BACK LINKS.

They do not, DO NOT, refer to honestly earned, ethically obtained, reasonably relevant exchange or reciprocal links.

Please, for your own peace of mind if for no other reason, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=393nmCYFRtA and listen to every word of “Sheriff” Matt Cutts explaining Google’s new Link Disavowal Tool. Every word, all nine minutes plus of the video, because many people commenting on it admit to clicking it off after the first two or three minutes and most of them have, understandably, missed the point.

While viewing the video, keep a mental count of the number of times he refers to the Unnatural Links Warnings emails and related penalties and take notice that every reference to them – every single reference – links (pardon the pun) the warnings and penalties exclusively to back link scams, without a single reference to link exchange or reciprocal links.

Obviously this does not mean that websites employing what Google describes in its guidelines as “link exchange schemes” won’t still be penalized … they will and they should be. But that’s always been true and hasn’t changed a bit since Panda and Penguin. And lets remind you that when they say “link exchange schemes”, they are referring to full duplex programs and services that get you a high number of irrelevant links in a short period of time. It is not normal for sites to get high numbers of links in short periods of time.

What has changed is that Google is finally closing some of the loopholes (loop chasms would be a better description) in its back link ranking algorithms that have allowed black hat SEO con artists to subvert and pervert the whole concept of using links from so-called authority sites to influence return positions. What has also changed is that backlink scammers are finally going to be shoveled into the same dumpster as reciprocal link scammers delivering high volume irrelevant links.

In simple terms, the Link Disavowal Tool is Google’s long-delayed acknowledgment that backlink fraud has gotten totally out of control …

What Google is doing is finally leveling the linking playing field. Build your reciprocal linking program the right way as we have been detailing on these pages for almost 15 years and you will be rewarded.

Similarly, if you attract backlinks the right way, by building a quality, informative site that other operators of quality sites will naturally want to link to, you will likewise be rewarded.

Attempting to cheat the system by buying hundreds of dubious quality links of either kind, by doing blog spamming etc. to attract back links, or by using automated link harvesting to add wholesale quantities of non-editorially obtained reciprocal links and you will be slapped.

Note: While we would obviously like you to build your links the right way by using LinksManager, you don’t really have to. The information in the Linking School and these blogs is available to everyone and can be used as guidelines for constructing an entire Google-friendly reciprocal linking program without using LinksManager. Assuming, of course, that you’ve got 25 or 30 hours a week to do manually what it would take you a few minutes a week with LinksManager.

Doing honest, ethical, productive reciprocal linking that will increase your non-search engine traffic, improve your search engine rankings and add clout to your branding efforts is easy and so is undoing any black-hat mistakes (accidental or deliberate.) Simply delete the spammy links from your page. In most cases, this will cause the other party to automatically drop their link to your site.

Repenting from one-way back linking sins is, however, much more difficult since you have no control over sites that link to you and the person peddling whatever scam you fell prey to probably shut down his site and reopened under a different name long ago.

Which is where the new Link Disavowal Tool discussed by Matt Cutts comes into play. In simple terms, the Tool is Google’s long-delayed acknowledgment that backlink fraud has gotten totally out of control and that most webmasters guilty of engaging in it have no practical way, pardon yet another pun, to “back” out of their indiscretions.

As with everything “Googlish” there is no shortage of controversy about the Link Disavowal Tool, particularly in regard to when and how and why to use (or not use) it.

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While this post is not exactly private, it might not be of much interested to you if you’re not a LinksManager subscriber.

You see, while most of the search-engine optimization world — the SEO “specialists” dressed to the nines in gloom suits, the paid-by-the-hour doomsday consultants, the panic-peddling pundits …

While all these self-proclaimed Google gurus are whining and moaning about Panda, Penguin, and falling skies, a very strange and wonderful thing is being reported by hundreds of long-time LinksManager link-management system subscribers.

LinksManager subscribers who have refused to join the bum’s rush to respond to the new algos by tearing profitable websites apart, abandoning or totally replacing perfectly productive links, and changing the way they present their articles and blogs.

Knowing that their white hat sites are in full compliance with all Google guidelines pre-and post-Panda/Penguin (thanks in large part to LinksManager’s patented search-engine-spam-resistant technology), these small- and mid-sized business webmasters have chosen to stand pat, to keep on keeping on, too wait for the Panda/Penguin dust to settle before making any major changes to their sites.

And now, roughly five months after Penguin and Panda lurched onto the scene, these level-headed, unflappable e-trepreneurs are reaping the rewards of showing courage under adversity as their sites inexorably rise in Google’s rankings and returns while using the same Google-friendly link exchanging and search-engine optimization techniques they’ve always used.

Such Google guideline and Search-Engine-Optimization Starter Guide-recommended techniques as:

– Establishing links to “sites that cover topic area similar to yours”
– Gradually adding links to your site at a controlled rate
– Avoiding “tricks intended to improve search engine ranking”
– Avoiding “links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods”
– Making sites with “a clear hierarchy and text links”
– And, as always, making pages “primarily for users, not for search engines”

While we can all fuss, fight and argue about how Panda and Penguin change the specific ways in which Googlebot and its relatives enforce these and all Google’s other guidelines, one fact is indisputable: The new algorithm updates do not in any way, shape or form change those guidelines.

In regard to linking and many other issues, the goal of the new algorithms is the same as that of all the previous algorithms, to punish the bad guys and reward the good guys. And, based upon the reports of many LinksManager users as well as other empirical evidence, that goal is being met because:

– Google has stripped an unusually large number of black-hat, dark-gray-hat, and full-blown spam sites from the higher regions of the return pages post Panda/Penguin.
– Compared to their predecessors, Panda and Penguin have been doing a better job of cutting the creepy, crawly legs off bullshit link-bait sites that pollute the internet with $5-a-pop “expert” articles on everything from healthcare to home repair.
– The Penguin/Panda auto mailers have been doing a pretty decent job of sending their infamous non-compliance warnings to site owners who deserve them and not sending them to site owners – such as LinksManager subscribers – who don’t.

Basically, Penguin/Panda, by clearing a lot of rubble out of the top return pages, has made room for uncounted numbers of white-hat, guideline-compliant sites – exactly the kind of sites operated by virtually all LinksManager members – to move up.

Needless to say, we are extremely gratified, excited, and are even getting a little bit giddy by the news that so many LinksManager subscriber sites are rising in the rankings now that Panda and Penguin are running at full speed.

Gratified, excited, giddy, but not surprised. Not surprised because we’ve been preaching and teaching white-hat, end-user-focused, search-engine-compliant linking for 15 years. And for every one of those 15 years, regardless of which search engine happened to be king and what algorithms any of the major engines were using, thousands of LinksManager users have said the same thing: It works for me.

The only thing that’s changed is that today, post Panda and Penguin, it seems to be working better than ever.

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Are Google’s latest changes to its ranking algorithms Panda and Penguin the first step in its exit strategy?

“Exit strategy”? Google? Is this headline merely a shameless (and apparently successful) way to get your attention?

Yep, sure is. However, to that admission we will now append a quite serious prediction: Venture capitalists and other speculators holding Google shares will have taken their profits and exited Google for potentially greener pastures by Q3 2017, roughly five years from today.

This is not to say that Google won’t still be the world’s most-accessed search engine for the rest of this decade, that DoubleClick, AdWords, and all the other Google profit centers won’t still be printing money faster than the Treasury Department, that Google will be a shell of its “Golden Age” self much as Yahoo is today.

Not at all, not even in 2018. The shadow-of-its-former-self phase won’t be evident until at least 2021-2022. But it will happen …. it will inevitably happen. All empires eventually decline. This decline will first be evident in the stock market, roughly five years from today.

What makes Google’s eventual decline and fall so historically interesting, so awesomely off the wall that books, a lot of books (most of which will have everything wrong), will be written about it is this:

Somebody, some VIG (Very Important Googlite), someone who might, under the right kind of interrogation light, look suspiciously like Larry Page, made a deliberate, rational, totally justifiable business decision to begin the slide back into the search-engine pack.

Nonsense? No king, czar, robber baron, or run-of-the-mill dictator deliberately decides to dismember his empire. Maybe not. But there really is no other way to explain the deployment of Panda and Penguin, which are clearly designed to introduce chaos into natural search returns and force end-users to access paid links to find what they’re looking for.

Is sowing chaos into the natural returns cesspool a crime? No, though the discriminatory way Google’s going about it may be a violation of numerous anti-trust and restraint-of-trade laws.

Another question. Is Panda/Penguin’s deliberate perversity a “back away” from Google’s founding philosophy of “Do no evil”?

Depends on how you define “evil.” Google is a publicly traded corporation. Trashing natural returns to increase the numbers and click-through rate of paid ads will no doubt favorably impress shareholders while provoking a great deal of enmity here and elsewhere.

But, hey, the fundamental duty of corporate officers and directors is to raise revenues, profits, and shareholder value. So no, manipulating end users toward paid advertisers is not, in a free market-sense, evil … it is merely Google’s management doing the job it was hired to do.

If you were Larry Page, well aware that all empires eventually fade and already hearing footsteps from Facebook, Bing, and a host of as-yet-unborn new technologies and companies that will soon join them in competing for slices of the web advertising pie, what would you do?

Most of us would at least consider a deal with the devil. A deal that would trade away a bit of one’s soul and a few years of dominance at the end of one’s reign for an enormous increase in short- and mid-range revenue.

With Google the answer was written on the wall as far back as the J.C. Penney scandal.  Scribbled in big, bold letters by Matt Cutts when he answered “So what?” to questions from New York Times reporters investigating the sale of number one “natural” search-return positions to one of Google’s five largest advertisers.

And now along come Panda and Penguin, ostensibly to further “purify” the returns by:

a. Penalizing sites that violate Google’s various guidelines

b. Penalizing sites that don’t violate Google’s guidelines, but run afoul of Penguin and Panda nitpicks not yet incorporated into the guidelines

c. Penalizing sites that are just fine except for not being search-engine optimized enough

d. Penalizing sites that are “overly optimized” for search engines

e. Penalizing sites that achieved high rankings by spending enormous amounts of time and — in many cases — money meeting and exceeding all Google’s pre-Panda/Penguin quality, relevancy, content, and linking standards.

It goes on and on …. no rhymes, no reasons, no conspiracies. The fickle fingers of Mountain View are daily embracing a rather small subset of the web’s approximately 100 million sites and randomly deciding to elevate some and destroy others.

If you really want to understand how Panda/Penguin has yanked the chains, rattled the cages, and skyrocketed the blood pressures of thousands upon thousands of small ebusiness owners, all you have to do is read the following automated email from Google to tens, hundreds, and maybe, by now, millions of webmasters:

“We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.”

Put yourself in the position of a typical recipient of this post. What do you do first? Rush to your computer and check your return position and page rank. You sigh in relief, they are unchanged. But what about that email?

Is it a warning or just random spam? Will ignoring it result in your site being delisted from the Google Index next year, next month, next week? Tomorrow?

As a LinksManager user, someone who has painstakingly built a well-ranked site by obeying all the rules and using all the tools Google advocated prior to Panda/Penguin, you know you don’t have any bad links because you’ve vetted every link using LinksManager’s patented editor based technology.  But still … maybe … just to be on the safe side, you should push a few things on your site around, just to show Google’s robots you’ve gotten the message and done something.

But doing that will make your site at least slightly less well-optimized than it was before. What if making those changes gets you a lower spot on the totem pole instead of protecting the rankings you already have?

And what, what, what about Google’s demand that you “look for possible artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site”?  Links pointing TO your site???  But those aren’t exchange links or reciprocal links, those are backlinks. How are you supposed to control who links to your site?  The search engines have stated repeatedly in the past that they realize you have NO CONTROL over who links to your site.

If you read between the lines, they are defining “unnatural” as paid links or a method that generates a high volume of inbound links in a short period of time.  As a LinksManager user, you know that it’s impossible to get a high number of links over a short period of time using our system.

So enough, you get the picture. Over time, slowly, what Google probably wants is to kill is search-engine optimization.  Not just the commercial side of it, the professional SEO business, but all of it. To make SEO essentially irrelevant.

Google already has the physical right and technological might to return any site in any position it wants. What it wants now is to have the moral right as well. It wants to eliminate having to pretend that there are guidelines that bind its actions.

Since creating something for people to hate is not very difficult, we predict Google will easily achieve this particular goal. Building something that people love, however, is much more difficult, so we also predict Google and its Damndroid have zilch chance of ever overtaking the iPad.

In fact, given a bit of luck, some intelligent pricing, and a few upgrades to its traditionally lame consumer marketing skills, Microsoft and its Metro GUI may just relegate Damndroid to same purgatory occupied by Palm, Blackberry, Psion and so many others.

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Without getting into detail, which we will in future posts, Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithms’ “bold, new ways” of ranking websites have vaporized much conventional wisdom about search-engine optimization.

They’ve done this, in large part, by relocating a lot of search-engine optimization practices from the “gray area” to the black one.  Which means that maintaining a high-quality, 100 percent white hat and search-engine-compliant reciprocal linking profile is critically important right now, at this minute.

Here’s the Top 5 Reasons Why You Should Keep (Or Start) Linking:

1. Contrary to what fly-by-night operators pimping search-engine-optimization snake oil claim, editor-based, relevant reciprocal linking and link exchanging have always been fully compliant with Google and Bing’s guidelines.

Schemes involving paid links, link harvesting, high volume irrelevant links between irrelevant sites, links to spam sites and links to sites in bad neighborhoods that exist only to try and fool search engine robots are NOT compliant.

Which is exactly why establishing relevant links between websites with high-quality content of value to end users is crucial.

2. It is getting increasingly harder for small business sites to survive solely on search-engine-generated traffic. A lot of the borderline search-engine “influencers” that web operators could often get away with if used in moderation is now totally forbidden.

Except for search engines, link exchanges are still, and always have been, the most potent zero-cost way to attract unique visitors to your site.

More than that, the visitors who follow relevant reciprocal links to your site are more likely to convert into customers than other visitors because they’ve already expressed an interest in your products or services.

3. Relevant links to high quality sites can and do help improve search-engine rankings and return positions.

Adding new links to your site at a natural organic growth rate is like adding new content.  It shows search robots that your site is alive and expanding rather than stagnating.  And if, on parsing the linked sites, a robot finds high-quality content that offers value to your end users, your link popularity rises.

4. Buying links is still bad. The J. C. Penney/Google scandal forced all the major search engines to acknowledge the size and pervasiveness of the backlink “black market” and take steps to identify and punish webmasters who participate in it.

With the engines now counting only legitimate backlinks from relevant authority sites as positive ranking indicators, reciprocal links – when established on the basis of quality and relevance – are once again popular.

5. Linking is a powerful branding tool. Brand building is now the absolutely, positively most important thing you can do to drive traffic to your site because . . . because the ONLY sure way for someone to find your site from a browser search or address bar is to type in its name.

Google “computer software” and you’ll hunt till your eyes get weary looking for “microsoft.com.” Yet millions of people find it everyday because no one searches for Microsoft, they just enter the name in their browser.  Like Sony, Honda and a lot of other brands.

Including a lot of very small brands, local brands. Y ou ask a friend who his accountant is.  He tells you it’s Martin Numbercruncher.  You don’t Google “accountant,” you Google “Martin Numberchruncher accountant.”  And Mr. Numbercruncher shows up number in the top returns.

Imagine that.  Every time you ally your site with a compatible, relevant site you are helping build your brand with that link partner’s site visitors.

To sum up, you really should keep (or start) linking.

Linking honestly, productively, time and cost effectively and search-engine compliantly.  Linking with the power of LinksManager, the world’s only patented link-management solution and the only linking service in history with nearly 15 years of continuous compliance with Google and every other major search engine guideline.

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“It seems some people still haven’t learned one of the biggest lessons that came from Panda: you can’t rely on Google as your sole source of traffic and income. That’s a doomed business model. There are plenty of other marketing tactics … ”
– Danny Goodwin, associate editor, Search Engine Watch

You said it, Danny, that sentiment is so spot on we’ll even repeat it for you in case somebody or other skipped the quote and started reading the blog here.

“You can’t rely on Google as your sole source of traffic and income. That’s a doomed business model. There are plenty of other marketing tactics … “

Yes there are, Danny, plenty of other marketing tactics …. including our own trio of exceptional traffic and revenue builders – LinksManager.com, the de facto standard in white-hat, productive link management for almost 14 years; ManagedSocialMedia.com, the world’s first custom social net posting solution; and our new business email marketing tool, TXTDirector.com.

Of course the statement “you can’t rely on Google as your sole source of traffic and income” has always been true for the 90-something percent of online businesses that don’t show up on the first two or three search-engine return pages.

What’s changed, what Danny Goodwin has perfectly recognized, is that the Google algo updates applied in April have so tweaked the definition of what Google previously considered a “good” page and site that creating high-ranking websites is now a virtually full-time and highly uncertain task.

Consider this. Almost exactly one year ago today (May 6, 2011), Google released a list of 23 (count ‘em 23) questions to ask when assessing the search-engine appeal of pages, articles, or other content you were thinking of adding or linking to your site.

Mind you, these were not the kind of questions you could snap answer while trying to get all the outgoing boxes taped before the brown truck showed up in the driveway.

These were questions like “does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?” Or “does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?”

Takes a bit of time, thought and even “original research” to come up with the answers to questions like that, doesn’t it? And don’t forget, there’s 21 more similar questions and you’re supposed to use them to “assess” all your content, not just one article.

Tough, right? Well, it just got tougher. Tougher because this year’s new algo would, Matt Cutts said a few days before it went live, punish “over-optimization.”

Over what? What happened to the world as we knew it? A world where any black-hat optimization – automated and irrelevant links, little or no original content, bogus backlinks, etc. – was bad and all white-hat optimization – relevant, value-added links, large banks of original articles, a constant stream of new content, etc. – was good?

Apparently a number of Google VIPs also had trouble “processing” the over-optimization equation because the Menlo Park Monolith quickly dropped the “over-optimization” rhetoric in favor of something less …. less … hhhmmm, perhaps incendiary is a good word.

By the time the new algo went live, Google had dropped “over-optimization” in favor of an official pronouncement that the new algo’s mission was to target “only those practices” that violate the Google webmaster guidelines. Essentially, Google’s flacks said, the new algo was intended to more effectively do exactly the same thing as all the algorithms that preceded it.

Exactly, that is, except for one slight detail. The new algorithm, Google admitted, could and sometimes would downgrade and perhaps even totally de-index websites based on its personal opinion of content that would not be “easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise.”

Read that again and don’t be embarrassed if it makes you shudder. It’s having that affect on a lot of people.

Content that would not be “easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise.” Deep analysis, deep expertise. If it sounds like what they’re talking about is artificial-intelligence analysis and artificial-intelligence expertise, it’s probably because that’s exactly what they’re talking about. You – or even Matt Cutts – might not recognize an article as a piece of crap, but Googlebot, the spam-bomb sniffing dog of the internet, will.

To be fair, that probably doesn’t mean you’ll get bounced from the index for running a favorable article about a presidential candidate Googlebot doesn’t like. You may even be able to sneak a few nice comments about Bing or Facebook past the new algo (as long as they’re not too nice).

The bottomline is that Google is publicly admitting that properly evaluating whether or not an element on your site will help or hurt your search-engine return position requires a level of “analysis or expertise” that goes way beyond the ability needed to answer the 23 questions correctly.

It makes matching wits with a robot an integral part of assessing the value of content that is neither obviously black hat or stunningly white hat. It makes the 23 questions seem like a pop quiz instead of a final exam.

It gives tossing out the dirty bathwater of unethical search-engine optimization a higher priority than preserving the baby of a small business person being able to out-optimize a Fortune 500 company through diligent application of blood, sweat, toil and human intelligence.

And it makes a mockery of this “basic principle” included in Google’s own supposedly cherished “quality guidelines:” A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you.

So much for that. Might as well list that thumb on the eBay body parts page. The new rule, the 2012 rule, is “whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done” to an impatient robot sitting in judgment of your analysis and expertise.

Archie, Gopher, Veronica, Infoseek, Jeeves, AltaVista, Northern Lights, Lycos … where the hell are all you guys now that we really need you?

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Some not-very-funny comedian once said that there are only two kinds of webmasters. Those who have received THE LETTER and those who will receive THE LETTER.

THE LETTER, of course refers to the “death sentence” Gmail Google sometimes, but not by-any-means always, delivers when it has kicked a site down the ranking stairs for allegedly – somehow, someway – violating one or more of Big G’s various webmaster guidelines.

There have been numerous versions of THE LETTER over the years. The content tends to change often … whenever Google tweaks its algorithms, for example. Or when there are changes in the “nasty” section of the e-mail writing department. Or when Matt Cutts takes a … OK, maybe THE LETTER doesn’t change quite that often.

For the record, we’re going to give you some excerpts from the latest version of THE LETTER. But before you read them you should know that virtually every expert who tracks Google’s policing policy, from moderators of webmaster forums to bloggers to e-commerce-oriented social-network posters, agree on one thing: Google has significantly, very significantly, stepped up enforcement of its anti-search-engine spam policies since the beginning of this year.

To put that more simply, they are penalizing more sites for cheating and sending out more copies of THE LETTER than ever before. So here’s some text from the current (as of March) LETTER. followed by some tips on how to avoid getting it.

Dear site owner or webmaster:
We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank.
Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.

If you’re already a LinksManager subscriber, or a regular reader of this blog, or if you’ve ever read any of the articles in the Linking School, or spent some time in webmaster forums, you already know that non-relevant links, automatically generated links, links from known spam-site hosts (bad neighborhoods), too many links added too fast, and most paid links fall into that great, big cauldron of Google (and Bing and Yahoo and Ask) no-no’s called “Black Hat Search Engine Optimization Schemes.”

But you may not have known that Google has, in just the last two or three months, significantly upgraded the technology it uses to seek and destroy – with or without sending THE LETTER – sites using those techniques.

You may also have never considered that Google’s — and the other engines’ – “courts” have the same philosophy as the rest of criminal justice system: Ignorance of the law is no excuse.

Unfortunately, it is all too easy for most web operators to remain ignorant of some of the finer points in Google’s anti-spamming “penal” codes. For one thing, those codes are constantly changing and many new or revised regulations about what you can and can’t do frequently don’t make their way into the published guidelines until months after Google starts enforcing them.

Sometimes, as many webmasters have found to their sorrow, being totally aware of what’s in the guidelines and trying conscientiously to stay within them still isn’t enough. One contributing factor is that everyone – including, a lot of the time, us – tends to focus overly much on “white hats” and “black hats.”

The truth is that the “pure whites” and the “true blacks” exist only at the far edges of the search-engine-optimization spectrum. The huge part in the middle – say 70 or so percent of the whole – is made up of numerous shades of gray, just a like a monochrome photograph or a faxed image.

Fortunately, the search engines, including Google, don’t really expect sites to live totally in the pure white. They understand how competitive the game is and that success in it requires webmasters to be reasonably aggressive. So what they look for is a site’s position on the continuum … does it sit on the lighter side of the gray area or the darker side.

(NOTE: Sites obviously breaking punishable-by-death commandments such as the ones listed above are NOT judged on a continuum, they are summarily executed.)

Search-engine ranking, as we all know, is based on a multitude of factors – more than 200, Google says – of which links are only one, arguably the most important one, but still only one of many.

Some of the other things are how often you add new site content, whether your blogs and articles are duplicated on other websites, who (and who doesn’t) put backlinks to your site on theirs, the quality of your navigation elements and site map, how well you use (or don’t) “no-follow” tags, etc. etc. etc.

Many of those 200 factors are a.) beyond any webmaster’s direct control or b.) very difficult for someone who isn’t a full-time search-engine-optimization professional to understand and fine tune. Which makes it crucial for webmasters make sure all the elements they can control are pure white-hat to counterbalance any of the non-controllable elements that may be a bit “off-color.”

Of the critical search-engine-ranking elements you can take charge of, linking is by far the most important (in terms of both the emphasis the “engines” place on it and its inherent ability to generate traffic and sales) and the easiest to keep “pure.”

There are essentially two ways to get the full benefit and protections offered by white-hat link pages. The first is to memorize the guidelines, check Google’s webmaster pages for changes regularly, and spend 12 or 20 or more hours per week building and maintaining those link pages.

The second way, the only sane way really, is to subscribe to LinksManager build a link presence that is better, more effective, and more search engine and end-user friendly than any do-it-yourself effort.

Why, LinksManager?

Because …

– LinksManager’s patented technology and proprietary system processes make it impossible for anyone using it properly to inadvertently, accidentally or unintentionally violate any Google (or other major search engine) webmaster guidelines about linking.

There are no gray areas in the LinksManager spectrum. The system is 100 percent pure white. The truth is, LinksManager is so heavily armored against “black-hat” operations that it is difficult for anyone using it improperly to deliberately violate Google’s guidelines.

Since the best we can do on that score is make it difficult but not, sadly, impossible for really stubborn scammers to misuse the program, we rigorously and continuously check for signs of improper usage attempts and mercilessly purge anyone trying it.

– Other so-called link-management systems may automatically, without your knowledge, do things that could get your site de-rated or totally banned by Google and/or other engines. Some of these “things” include establishing links between your site and link farms, affiliate sites, pay-for-play sites and sites existing on known “dark-side” hosts.

You may have never thought of it in these terms, but your website is the vehicle in which your business travels. Where other linking programs can grab the wheel and steer you right into a ditch, LinksManager can’t. LinksManager’s editor-based technology ensures that you remain firmly in the driver’s seat and always get to look before you link.

– The static HTML link pages created when using LinksManager are much, much easier for Googlebot and other search engine robots to access than those created by inferior programs that generate Java, Flash or other non-standard pages.

– Link pages created with LinksManager contain ZERO hidden text or keywords. LinksManager NEVER uses frames or generates DOORWAY or DUPLICATE pages.

– LinksManager as a company and as a product operates under the linking and search-engine optimization industry’s highest code of ethics and dedication to web best practices.

– We have been successfully helping tens of thousands of webmasters drive traffic to their sites, brand their products and improve their search-engine rankings since the dawn of Google time. Or, to look at it another way, for 12 years before Bing was even born. The search engines know us, trust us, and, along with the rest of the web community (excluding black-hat link scam peddlers and our cheesy imitators), consider us good Netizens and neighbors.

– With LinksManager you’ll never have to worry if your linking outreach to other sites will trigger THE LETTER. It won’t.

End of sales pitch. Almost. Except for this link, which will take you to a full list of LinksManager features. And this one, which will let you signup for a full, free and absolutely no obligation 30-day trial

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Choose your favorite cliché.

“The race is on.”

“The fat’s in the fire.”

“The other shoe has dropped.”

However you want to describe the Bing/Facebook linking initiative, its emergence as a new tool for (allegedly) creating synergetic ties between search engines and social media posts was inevitable once Google announced Google+ World.

Before going any further, here’s two crucial facts about Microsoft’s brand spanking new Bing’s Linked Pages:

1: According to some studies, at least those commissioned by Microsoft, more than 60% of Facebook’s 800,000,000 members keep the Facebook tab open in their browsers whenever they’re online.

2: Microsoft and Yahoo, which share a common search index (compiled by MS), control roughly 33% of the US search query market. Granted, Google answers somewhere upward of 60% of U.S. search queries. But we’re talking billions, trillions of individual searches here. Thirty something percent of those has more consumer reach than all the commercials ever aired during all the Super Bowls ever played.

So, why are those two facts important? Because Bing’s Linked Pages (BLP) only work when the user is connected to Facebook, and because Microsoft has yet to announce whether or not BLP-influenced returns will also appear in searches initiated via Yahoo.

Since we turned our traditionally jaundiced eye on Google+ World in our last post, we won’t bore you by reiterating its pros and cons here. Suffice it to say that Google+ World and Microsoft’s much more prosaically named Bing’s Linked Pages are essentially the same animal with one key difference. Where Google+ World leans toward the social side of “social media” more than the commercial side. Bing’s Linked Pages seems much more amenable to being exploited by those with products to sell, commercial traffic to build, and businesses to brand.

In fairness, it must be pointed out that this is not necessarily what Microsoft intended when it birthed the “beast.” In fact, Microsoft Bing Director Stefan Weitz says Bing Linked Pages is merely an attempt to “infuse the idea of emotion into the decision engine.”

(Note: Any attempt to use Google Translate – or any similar product – to render the above quote into comprehensible English is doomed to failure.)

Whatever its creator’s intent, however, Bing’s Linked Pages is Microsoft’s beast and the nature of the beast is that it appears to have great potential as a tool for e-commerce enterprises.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. What would make it a bad thing — a very bad thing — is heavily tilting the search returns influenced by Bing’s Linked Pages toward big-time multinational web enterprises and against small e-commerce businesses.

Sadly, that’s exactly what Microsoft seems to have done. Stripped of all the BS – and Microsoft has unleashed a ton of it, most constructed of the same smoke and mirrors as Stefen Weitz’ “infuse the idea of emotion” sound bite – Bing’s Linked Pages seems to be a throwback to the bad old days of search engines. The days when all that mattered was the “body count,” aka the “beauty contest.” The days when quantity meant everything and quality less than nothing.

What BLP does is tally up a Facebook page’s “Likes” and translate them into return position. The more “likes” you have, the more Bing’s Linked Pages loves you. The fewer “likes,” the more it hates you.

OK, millions of Microsoft groupies – some still in Bill Gates coke-bottle glasses and some not – will scream that the above paragraph is a gross over simplification of an enormous number of sophisticated processes.

Guess what? All those angry folks are right. We used a very simplistic description of what Bing’s Linked Pages does.

Guess something else. They’re also wrong. Because Bing’s Linked Pages does exactly what we said it does. We just traveled directly from Point A to Point B directly, while the program presumably twists and turns its way through the seven rings of algorithm hell before arriving at the same place we did.

This place. The place where an outfit like J.C. Penney, to use a corporate Goliath with a well-documented history of search-engine scamming as a purely hypothetical example, could run TV ads offering people a 25 percent discount coupon for going to its Facebook page and clicking the “like” button.

A couple of hundred thousand purchased — because that’s really what we’re talking about – “likes” later, Goliath dominates the search returns displayed to all those millions of people who stay logged onto Facebook while browsing the web. As a kind of fallout, every small local or regional department store chain gets buried.

To scale it down to a more meaningful level, consider pizza parlors. Virtually every meaningfully sized municipality once had two or more local pizza purveyors whose pies would blow the oven doors off the soggy pre-fabbed mush of the national chains. Not anymore. Now people who don’t live in a relatively urban area are lucky to have one “homemade” option to the “huts” and “papas” and “caesars” of the industry.

There are a number of factors – national advertising and the public’s willingness to sacrifice quality for price being two – for the demise of many independent pizzerias, but the search engine industry’s long-standing preference for “name brands” is one of them.

Just think how many more of these quintessentially small businesses would die if the number of Facebook Likes became a major return-position factor.

At this point, we’d like to remind you that LinksManager and the LinksManager blog are about providing business solutions to e-entrepreneurs. Solutions that are becoming ever more vital in the increasingly fragmented and dysfunctional world of search-engine behavior.

Specifically, what we offer are business-to-business link and social media management systems — LinksManager, Managed Link Building and Managed Social Media — that save you endless hours of toil while driving non-search engine generated traffic to your site and, improving your search engine rankings and return position.

So when we blog about things like Google+ World or Bing’s Linked Pages, we do it from the business implication POV. We don’t deal with the non-commercial implications a lot. As an example, both Google+ World and Bing’s Linked Pages raise a myriad of personal privacy, electronic intrusion, data collection, dissemination and security, and similar issues. The pros and cons, rights and wrongs, and legal or illegal nature of these “issues” will be discussed, debated, and almost certainly litigated over the course of months and years.

If you want to keep yourself informed about those aspects of these programs, go to the search engine of your choice and poke around a bit. Don’t worry, you won’t have to get “lucky.” Info on the subject from all points of the political and social compass is pouring down from cyberspace in buckets.

Which doesn’t mean that we’re all done with Bing’s Linked Pages. Overlooked in many of the news stories about BLP is Microsoft’s alleged claim that it will eventually – or maybe even immediately – allow users to “manage any” Web pages “about” them, not just Facebook pages.

If this sounds scary, like something that could be used to seriously dilute the value of public service sites like the Ripoff Report, it’s because it is scary. On the other hand, even speculating that Microsoft would, or could, open the door to that kind of Web censorship – even if it would be limited to Facebook friends – verges on madness.

So the “manage any web pages” bit may mean something benignly else altogether. Frankly, we don’t know. But we definitely intend to find out before our next post. Stay tuned.

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Yeah, okay, fine. So, just like the rest of the world, you want to know about Google+.

Actually if you’re like most of us around here, one of the last things in the world you’d like to know about is Google+. One more aggravation, one more irritation, one more roadblock, one more impediment, one more — to put it like it really is — potential train wreck on the way to getting and maintaining a decent return position for your website.

Unfortunately, staying ignorant about Google+ is not an option. The inescapable truth is that Google is the big bad (or good, depending upon your current return position) guerrilla in the e-commerce neck of the woods and pretending to be deaf, dumb and blind about the gorilla’s latest products and strategies and algorithms and mental state can be exceedingly hazardous to the state of one’s financial health.

So let’s start by asking and attempting to answer a few questions about Google+? Is it eventually going to toss Facebook and Twitter under the bus the way it did Yahoo, Lycos , Northern Lights, MSM , etc. and ad nauseam ? Not a chance. Not this time.

Facebook in its own way is a phenom and in its own heavily fortified space in the cyber universe every bit as powerful as Google is in the world of search engines. Google+ has nothing to really challenge Facebook with and probably never will.

This state of affairs is undoubtedly depressing to Larry Page. Doubly depressing, when he was listening to the baying of all the witless financial analysts pretending to believe that the sky was falling because Google racked up a “mere” $2.9 billion in profits for Q4 2011. Disturbing as the facts may be to Mr. Page, however, facts are facts. Confronted with Facebook’s ascendancy during the latter half of the past century, Google — to sum up its reaction in three words — did a Yahoo.

As we all remember, Yahoo was fast asleep at the switch when Google started roaring down the line at the turn-of-the-century. Google, rather amazingly, was asleep at the exact same switch when Facebook began its move. Yahoo woke up way too late to contest Google for search engine supremacy and Google has awakened to late to seriously challenge Facebook. In both cases the battles had been waged and lost before the losers even realized they were in a fight.

Since nothing in the world of business is impossible, Google may somehow, someday be able to wrest the social networking crown from Facebook’s head. But from today’s vantage point, it’s hard to see how that could happen unless Facebook made some kind of catastrophic misstep. Something on the other of a massive security lapse that resulted in a few hundred million of its user profiles winding up on Wikileaks . Could happen, but it’s not likely.

Twitter, is another story. It has a tremendous network and a great deal of power. The political upheaval in Egypt that led to the ousting of Hosni Mubarak was largely coordinated via tweets between various geographically scattered groups of dissidents.

On the other hand, Twitter has very limited cash flow and earnings. Edison Research analyst Tom Webster’s description of Twitter as a “company that raises mountains of cash but makes less money than a twelve year-old with a paper route” is exaggerated but essentially true. Especially when Twitter’s financials are stacked next to Google’s and Facebook’s. And while venture capital is a beautiful thing, there inevitably comes a day when investors becoming exceedingly restless if the aren’t seeing any return on their investment. So Twitter, unless and until, it figures out a better way to monetize its service will to one extent or another be vulnerable to an attack from a determined adversary as well heeled as Google.

At the moment, Google’s strategy in the war between the social nets appears to be based mostly on coercion. Refuse to become a member of Google+ and you won’t be allowed to open a new Gmail account, for example. And if you decide to hold your breath waiting for Google to apply the same restriction to Picasa , Youtube , Google Talk, unlocked (i.e. non-telco provided) Android devices and other products you probably won’t suffocate if you manage to hang on until the March 1 imposition of Google’s new one size fits all user profile and privacy policy goes into effect.

Reprehensible or not, the current strategy has already, Google claims, harvested more 100 million Google+ members. Whether or not a substantial number of those shanghaied into signing up for Google+ ever use the service or even remember that they have an account on once signed up for it is an open question, but given the size of and growth rate of the user base Google+ is eventually going to be hosting billions of posts.

Which brings us to what, if this were a movie, could be titled “Nightmare in Menlo Park, Part 17: Google Search+Your World” (GS+ YW ), the successor to Google Social Search. Still in its infancy, GS+ YW seems, on its surface, benign enough. In fact, Google is e-papering the web with scores, if not hundreds, of pages telling us exactly how benign it is. How it is not an invasion of privacy. How it is easy to disable. How effectively you’ll be protected against having your posts turning up in global search returns.

To loosely paraphrase Shakespeare, it does appear to that Google may be overly protesting the assertion that GS+ YW may grow to be not quite as innocuous as claimed.

Theoretically, it works like this?

1. You log into your Google account to send an email or any one of a hundred other Googlie things. This automatically logs you into you Google+ account.

2. At some point or other you “Google” washing machines.

3. If anyone in your G+ circle has posted something about washing machines — say their love affair with a new Maytag — that post is returned as the first hit for your query.

Not so terrible, really, all the normal natural returns for washing machines lose only one return position. The possibility of the return positions get seriously tweaked by a dozen or more members of your circle writing washing machine posts at roughly the same time is slim to none.

The Catch 22 is a loophole called “public” posting. About which Google says:

Content in these (GS+ YW ) search results is public on the web. Public content may appear in the search results of ANYONE if it’s relevant to their search.

Now that special, isn’t it? Every Friday washing machine manufacturers and major vendors can give all their employees a 15 minute break open their Google+ accounts and tap out public post about washing machines.

What a lovely post-Christmas gift to all the webmasters who’ve sweated , struggled, and spent time and money to optimize their sites to appear somewhere on the first five or even 10 Google return pages. Give GS+ YW a year or so to shed its training wheels and all those return pages are likely to be buried behind multiple pages full of GS+ YW public posts.

Can operators of web-based small businesses do anything to mitigate or evade negative fallout from Google+ Your World? Probably. Since every action inevitably triggers a reaction, strategies to thwart GS+ YW will probably emerge once G+ emerges from gets the incubator and can be seen more clearly.

While we’re all waiting, we’d like to suggest that you put max effort into growing and strengthening your linking presence, preferably by taking advantage of LinksManager or ManagedLinkBuilding . Because whatever the post Google+ world holds, it’s pretty obvious that increasing your volume of non-search-engine based traffic is going to become more important than ever.

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