Greg Boser on Buying Links

I just got back from SES San Jose. Good show, good people, good parties. On the content side, Barry Schwartz wrote some excellent recaps as always. One of the most interesting sessions was Buying and Selling Links.

Greg Boser – WebGuerilla
Brief comments. He is very happy that there is now an actual session on this topic because it used to be considered so âbad.â The wild wild west of buying links is settling down and people are beginning to understand that it is advertising just like any other form. Sees that paid links will continue to be a part of their links in the future. Suggests adding it to your mix.

Text links have come a long way and continue to gain legitimacy and momentum as an advertising method which yields exceptional ROI. Buy up

Nick Wilson on the Hyperlink Hot Seat

Nick Wilson is the founder of Threadwatch, my *personal* favorite blog. If you read this blog, you know what Threadwatch is… enough said

1) Ask Jeeves: Up and coming 4th player, or forever ‘B Team’ material?

If Diller just sits on it, “B Team” all the way. If he pulls his finger out and actually does something with it then they stand a good chance of increasing market share, but even if he pulls out all the stops, i’m not convinced they’d be in with a shot at third place.

It’s all about image. If they dumped that bloody stupid butler, rebrand as ASK, take a leaf out of Yahoo’s book and open up to the rah rah blogpuppy mania movement, and promote a newer image, they could actually be dangerous. I don’t see them having that much gumption or courage, but you never know, Diller could pull a rabbit out of the hat at any time with ASK.

2) In last week’s Hyperlink Hot Seat, Aaron Wall commented on how Threadwatch has achieved a high level of success in a relatively short time (e.g., it’s been blogrolled on sites like Search Engine Watch, Yahoo! Search Blog and Ask Jeeves Blog). To what do you attribute Threadwatch’s steep growth curve of readership and recognition?

Being a bloody minded, egotistical, rude bastard. Didn’t you know?

Seriously, I think people are bored of corporate suck up sites, any muppet can use an RSS reader and scan for news, but who wants to read the bland, boring, opinionless “commentary” that most sites in this space spew out?

I’d sooner stick my head in a bucket of cold sick…

3) You’re responsible for inserting the words “bollocks” and “wanker” into my daily vocabulary. How do you feel about that?

Very proud. Fine british swear words! You’d not want your 12yr old child to be calling people wankers, but it’s pretty mild and harmless really.

4) Sites like ClickZ and CNET are STILL extremely niggardly in re to their linking policy. Will this ever bite them in the butt? Or will they just get away with it forever?

I think both are way behind the curve regarding news, and the way it’s reported. But I also think they’ll probably get away with being arses for quite some time to come. CNet’s latest attempt to catch up, “Blogma”, is a farce, it only serves to prove how badly they misunderstand the current climate. As for Clickz, despite some of their staff being deeply unhappy with their non-conversational policies, they’re about as clued in as CNet.

Who cares though?

5) The next time I have meat and mashed potatoes, I think I’ll put a very large blob of potatoes on my plate with just a little piece of meat. And if someone asks me why I didn’t get more meat, I’ll just say, “Oh, you mean this?” and pull out a big piece of meat from inside the blob of potatoes, where I’ve hidden it. Good magic trick, huh?

Yeah! You know, if you did that with minced meat in gravy, you’d have Shepards Pie – And that’s LEGAL

Top 28 Directories

With all our talk on crappy directories (about 200) and top tier directories (5), it seems we’ve neglected the middle. WeBuildPages is on the ball with their top 28 directories list (thanks to SEO guru Stuntdubl for the heads up).

I probably trust their analysis of quality more than anyone’s… that’s the closest you’ll get to an endorsement

Aaron Wall Still Likes Directories

Directories have taken a lot of crap lately, but don’t count them (all) out yet. Aaron Wall blogged yesterday about how he still likes directories (and believe me, he, if anyone, is aware of their flaws):

Even if Google was not placing significant weighting on directory links I still would use many of them for how they work in the other search algorithms, but with that being said it may also be worth looking more into other sources of link popularity as the business model of junk general directories is dying.

I think the business models that will work the best longterm will be those that have a strong social position in their marketplace, those who can afford to advertise a ton, those who can get media coverage, or those that naturally pick up the random citation on random blogs and community driven sites that provide many random unrequested links.

What I got from all this:

• MSN = easy to spam, even with crappy directory links
• Good directories = good
• Bad directories = bad
• Common sense is making a comeback

Link Builders

At the end of the day, link building takes tedious work. Most people do not want to put the effort into this, so they either look for “easy” ways of link building, or they try to outsource this task. That’s the subject of a recent WMW thread, One Way Link Obtaining Companies.

bhartzer: If link building is time consuming and tedious, it would only make sense to hire someone that specializes in doing just that–link building. Try a search at your favorite search engine–there’s plenty of people who specialize in link building. In fact, there are even a few that I would even hire–some have been doing it since 1995 (I won’t mention anyone in particular.) [he means Eric Ward, methinks.]

If you want one-way links then hire a PR person–someone who can get your URL in front of the media, focusing on the online media outlets.

Seems like good advice to me. The other thing that has worked well for me is to train someone reliable you know. They don’t have to know anything about SEO (in fact, it may be better if they don’t); you can teach them the basics and review their work. In my opinion this will usually work better than hiring a random link builder, since a fresh person you train won’t know the ’shortcuts’.