LinksManager.com Blog

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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