While on the link buying panel at WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon a few people were pushing that you might need to consider how Google will view your current link buys 5 years down the road, and that they may hurt you then for what you do now. Upon hearing that I said something like "less than 5 years ago I bought spammy links and if I did not I probably wouldn’t be speaking here right now". That got a cheer from the crowd. Who wants to be worried about what Google thinks or does 5 years from now? That is no way to innovate or take marketshare from current market leaders.

Reviewing Result Quality

When engineers view your site they don’t just look at "if you have a few spammy links" but they try to consider the quality of user experience and the ratio of clean links to dirty links. If your site is good and ranks for years then you are going to get many natural links that dwarf any spammy links that were part of your site launch.

Building a Real Business

If your business model is entirely reliant on Google 5 years from now, your user experience is sub-par, and you haven’t built up any brand equity after ranking for 5 years then there was not much effort put into building a legitimate business, and it deserves to fail. But the sites that rank get self reinforcing exposure. If SEO is part of your brand building and site building strategy you simply can not sit around waiting for the rankings to come in.

Inferior Sites Ranking #1

It is easy to lack objectivity when talking of the quality of your site, but in some fields I compete in, many of the top ranked competing sites are ran by people buying a slew of spammy links and pointing them at their (quite obviously) English second language sites. Because they rank, those sites get some number of self reinforcing links. If I did nothing but create great content they would still outrank my site. You have to buy marketshare in one way or another (public relations, AdWords, link buying) if you are trying to gain marketshare and your market is competitive.

Who Buys Links & Uses Push Marketing to Buy Marketshare?

That does not mean that I am an advocate of bad user experience or poor quality content, but if you care about SEO and have a new site in an old market, user experience and content quality are not enough unless you do some push marketing at launch. AOL sent out millions of spammy CDs to market their service.

• Google pushes their logo onto ads they distribute all over the web, has the largest push ad network on the web, has some of the dirtiest domain traffic partners (many cybersquatters), recommend infidelity, and bundle Google Checkout usage with lower ad prices and free links.
• Yahoo! has an in house SEO team and a few years ago Yahoo! was one of the leading link buyers.
• IAC buys a ton of links and aggressively cross links their sites.
• Microsoft has got in trouble for launching new products by bundling them with their old products and steals traffic by sending seobook.om traffic to their live search product.
• Monster.com owns a ton of thin lead generation sites.
• eBay pays affiliates to spam Google.
• One of Google’s large ad distribution partners tried setting up a deal with me to rank their ads in Google’s search results using aggressive black hat spammy techniques, in which I declined to participate in.

We Don’t Write the Algorithms (or Hand Edit Search Results)

As an SEO you simply give the engines what they want. Looking at what they rank and how they market their sites gives you better insights for how to rank than blindly trusting the tips they give you to prevent you from ranking and suggesting you buy their ads. All of the web portals you know and love use push marketing to build their businesses. Why shouldn’t you?

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Close to 40 percent of respondents said they are less likely to return to sites with bad product recommendations. Personalized product recommendations have a stronger influence on shopper behavior and that the bigger the spender, the more influence personalized recommendations have. Sixty-nine percent of shoppers that spent more than $1,000 online over the past six months are more likely to visits sites with personalized recommendations.

"The results of the 2007 survey clearly show how important it is for online retailers to help consumers with product discovery. Personalized recommendations are table stakes in today’s competitive ecommerce environment. But retailers that provide customers with poor quality recommendations are putting their brand and revenue at risk," said Toffer Winslow, EVP of Sales and Marketing at ChoiceStream.

"Online shoppers increasingly expect help with making selections, and retailers that provide high quality guidance are rewarded with higher consumer spending and more frequent visits."

Respondents defined poor recommendations as products they already owned (43%), products which were inappropriate (41%) or products did not meet their preferences (37%). Overall, 46 percent of shoppers say they have received bad recommendations during previous online shopping experiences.

Larger numbers of shoppers last year left online stores either not buying anything or spending less money than they had intended because they could not find items that matched their preferences.

Thirty-seven percent of shoppers said they would have purchased more music the last time they shopped online if they were able to find more that they liked. Forty-two percent said they would have purchased more movies and 57 percent said they would download ringtones, music and other content to their mobile devices.

Moderator: Chris Boggs, Manager, Search Engine Optimization, eMergent Marketing/BRULANT, Inc.

Speakers: William Leake, Founder and CEO, Apogee Search, Eric Ward, CEO, EricWard.com, Brian Boland, Director-adCenter, Microsoft Corporation.

It’s William Leake who’s first up to speak about this contentious issue, he says that it has really flared during the last 72 hours and has been up for many months now. He emphasizes the need to be honest with clients about using linking strategies, including the paid links, and the fact that they are a risky proposition. But the question arises about the efficacy of the paid links. Well the fact is that they do as Google’s attempts against paid links haven’t been too successful.

He suggests that new link discounting practices might simply give rise to other types of such strategies. He illustrates or example, of eco-system-wise, we’re seeing that directory links haven’t had a depreciation in their value over time. We need to take account of the fact that but paid blog posting all the more common. The paid links however aren’t a panacea, they ‘re just one element of an SEO campaign.

Then he talks about the highly competitive industries such as dept consolidation, insurance, mortgage, etc., they show that paid links can’t simply be ignored. On similar lines negative political publicity ads have their own place. So the impact of competitive forces is greater than Google’s preferences. ROI rules the roost and not Google’s choice. However paid links should not be the only strategy, better would be to have a holistic approach.

He then talked about advertising without disclosing and that FTC has also condemned it. It should not be Google to determine morality for the Internet. No doubt about the fact that the quality of the SERPs depreciates sometimes but that doesn’t happen too much. However Google does provide high ratings.

Next, comes up Sage Lewis, he calls the content of a website a "horse," as it’s the content that drives the cart, and suggests it’s unwise to put the cart before the horse. For you to have a good campaign it’s important to have appeal for sites. The question that’s paramount is "What’s in it for the users?." he goes on to offer advice for link building like, integration of community and corporate events, promotion of good work for the community, and offer an incentive to those you want to link to our site.

Brian from Microsoft takes up to the dais and and straight away quips that Microsoft sees the paid links as a technical problem and that "it is not throwing in the towel on like some other engines." He says that MS is on the way to solve this technical problem, and says that not it takes a normal search takes about 11 minutes to get good results, so the paid links problem has a solution in algorithm, which is solvable. He goes on to discuss that it’s easy it is for search engines to dissemble the linking universe.

MS wants nothing less than a "100% protect user experiences." as far as the ethics are concerned the statements are a fascination and it’s quality that’s important to MS, and its important because the users don’t waste time to switch over to another engine if they are frustrated with one.

PHOTO CREDITS: toprankonlinemarketing, Andy Beal’s Photos

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