LinksManager.com Blog

OK, maybe Matt Cutts isn’t exactly a Magi in the biblical sense of the word.  But he’s definitely a wise man.  A very wise man.  A well-educated wise man with summa cum laude bachelor’s degrees in math and computer science and a master’s degree (also summa cum laude) in science.

Exactly how wise is Matt Cutts?  Wise enough to join Google in January of 2000 when it had less than 100 employees and was no bigger than a fly on Yahoo’s Figgy Pudding. And while we have no clue what, if any, stock options and other inducements Larry Page and Sergey Brin used to entice wise guys like Matt Cutts to quit established tech companies and stake their careers on a shaky startup, we have no doubt that Matt, in his wisdom, took max advantage of whatever was offered.

Whatever the bonus it took to sign Cutts, Page and Brin bought themselves a bargain.  Beginning as a generalist software engineer, Matt wrote many of Google’s early content filters — including their highly regarded SafeSearch pornography blocker.

By 2004, Matt Cutts had moved up the career ladder to become Senior Staff Software Engineer and head of the Webspam group, which serves as the prosecuting attorney, judge, jury and parole board for web pages accused of violating Google guidelines by the Webspam group’s URL police.

Equally important, and the real reason he’s worth more to Google than whatever it cost to get him and keep him, is his role as corporate lightning rod.  Whether it’s in the responses to his own blog posts or on the pages of hundreds of other blogs, Matt Cutts is the guy who gets flamed for whatever real and imaginary indignities Google and its assorted bots and algorithms are accused of.

If a webmaster whose scammy, spammy site has just landed in the sandbox wants to get in somebody’s face about, he’ll find Matt Cutts — live and in-person — at just about any halfway major internet expo or web conference.

And while many of us, if we were Matt Cutts, would attend such an event wearing at least a mask, if not a full disguise, he doesn’t.  His convention name tag always says “Hi, I’m Matt” just as bold as brass and his company affiliation is always given as “Google.”

It was at one such gathering of the webmaster tribes held earlier this month (Pubcon 2007) that Matt gave individual web entrepreneurs, professional webmasters, legitimate SEO practitioners and everyone else who understands and utilizes the power of reciprocal linking, an early — and greatly appreciated — Christmas present.

The gift was small — only 11 words — but it may just be the best present under many web professionals’ Christmas trees this year.

What Matt Cutts said was this: Trading links is natural and it’s natural to have reciprocal links.

At first glance, that doesn’t seem like such an earth-shattering pronouncement.  After all, Google has never said anything bad about legitimate, relevant, natural reciprocal links ethically established and maintained.  Their guidelines warn against scams like excessive link exchange via link-farming, automated bulk linking and pay-for-play links, but what honest web businessperson lives that far on the dark side?

What makes Matt’s words such a sudden, unexpected, and powerful gift is that they provide the ultimate repudiation of the anti-linking FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) sown by legions of competency-challenged search engine optimization “consultants” whose incomes depend on finding scapegoats for their own ineptitude.

In the world according to the FUD mongers, reciprocal links that provide useful information to your customers and drive non-search-engine-dependent traffic to your site will somehow get you in trouble with Google even though neither Google as an entity nor any of its key executives has ever said anything of the kind.

Matt Cutts has a different world view.  He says enhancing your site with reciprocal links in a deliberate, ethical manner is just plain “natural.”

So the question is “who ya gonna trust?”

The FUD suckers sullenly hoofing it through the Sinai with holes in the bottom of their sandals or the Wise Man from Google serenely riding atop the Webspam Group camel?

And a merry Christmas to you, too, Matt.

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Lead, follow or get out of the way.

Where else has that old saw ever cut as deeply as it does on the Internet?  Think of all the auction sites that used to jockey for customers.  Where are they now?  A few are still around, dismally following eBay as they fall more and more laps behind in the race.  Most, the great majority, have simply gotten out of the way — even Yahoo pulled its auction site off the track earlier this year.

There’s also all those mall sites.  Oh, my goodness … legions of sites like ValueAmerica.com, WorldBestBuy.com, and Boo.com whose black-framed plaques are mounted next to Webvan’s in the WWW Hall of Shame.  They all quickly got out of the way of companies — like Amazon — which really understood the realities of Electronic Age marketing and technology.

And, lest we all forget, there are the search engines.  Dozens and dozens and dozens of them which stood still until the winds of change blew competitors past them.  Some (Lycos, Alta Vista and, yes, we do dare to include Ask and even MSN) are still doggedly sniffing along behind Google and Yahoo, most others have joined such former contenders as Go.com, Magellan.com, and Infoseek.com in getting out of the way.

At LinksManager, we are very proud to have remained the leader in effective, ethical link-management technology continuously since we virtually invented the industry over ten years ago.  During this decade we have had many competitors.  The majority — particularly those illegally ripping off our patent — have gotten out of the way, others stagger on offering half-cooked workarounds for a complex issue that requires a fully baked solution.

That said, we’re most definitely not resting on our laurels.  The phrase is lead , follow or get out of the way and we are well aware that “lead” is not the same word as “leader.”  The first, lead, is a verb.  Leader is a noun.  To lead requires action, you must DO something.

To put that in perspective, leaders who don’t lead almost inevitably morph into followers.  If that statement immediately brings to mind Yahoo and MSN, you’ve passed the test.  It should.  They were “leaders,” secure in the mistaken belief that what they were doing, what they’d always done, was still good enough, would always be good enough.  So they stopped doing, they refused to innovate, they didn’t lead so now they follow Google, which is continuing to lead (think of all their new products like GMail, Google books, Google checkout, Google word processing and spreadsheet, etc.) from its position as top dog on the pile.

LinksManager, like Google, is an industry leader determined to continue to lead.

We are dedicated to retaining our dominance in the link-management field through constantly adding new product features, refining old ones, and increasing the user friendliness of our system.

The latest example of this is a complete redesign of LinksManager’s Home Page intended to make everything you need to know about LinksManager faster to access, easier to comprehend, and more tightly focused around the three primary forms of link strategy: Linking for Small Business, Linking for Mid- and Large-Sized Enterprises and Linking for Search-Engine Optimization.

Looking back on 2007, we’re happy to say that reinventing our website is just the latest in a series of exciting LinksManager enhancements, improvements and embellishments in the last 12 months.

Among dozens of improvements large and small, three major program additions stand out:

– LinkBlogs, our exclusive technology combining the power of linking and blogging.

– The LinksManager Browser Toolbar, which enables you to micro-manage many aspects of your link program without ever clicking away from your web browser.

– ResponseRank, which calculates how long it takes webmasters to accept or decline link requests.

As LinksManager enters our second decade, we feel honestly justified in believing that we have fulfilled our obligation to you, our customers, to keep moving forward rather than stand still, to remain a leader in the link-management industry we helped create, to advance the state of the art in a critical component of the World Wide Web infrastructure.

Most of all, we feel re-invigorated and re-motivated to move even faster and extend our lead even further.  So if you think we’ve put a lot of new presents under the tree this year, hang onto your stocking … 2008 is going to be even better.

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