Confession time: I’m headed to Seattle next week for SMX Advanced, and I still haven’t started my slide deck. I’m not a procrastinator by nature, but when it comes to slides – well, I’d rather get a root canal than do slides.

Well, maybe not a root canal, but I have managed to find lots of things that must be done before I can start on my deck. So far I’ve cleaned out my desk, purged files, cleaned the office refrigerator and carpets. I figure  I owe it to myself to be fully organized in a clean setting before jumping into the arduous task of creating new slides. Heaven forbid if I needed to find a quote stashed in my filing cabinet after walking across the room to get a cold Diet Coke.

Getting started on anything is hard whether it’s a term paper, link building campaign or slide deck. It’s doubly hard when you don’t fully buy into the idea around the presentation which in my case involves showcasing linking tactics at a conference designed to follow an “advanced” track.  That’s right, I said it – I don’t think there’s any such thing as “advanced linking tactics”….  Read the rest on Link Week/Search Engine Land

Over the last couple of months I’ve noticed a step-up in sales pitches, ebooks and free guides covering just about any topic related to SEO, SEM and social media.    How people make their living is no concern of mine and I get that our industry has gotten crowded making it necessary for people to be creative in their advertising efforts but – I do raise an eyebrow when I see things being pitched as the ” Ultimate Handbook”
or the “Definitive Guide” and some of the information in the so-called guide is blatantly wrong.

Recently an email hit my inbox from someone shilling an “Ultimate Traffic Blueprint” that’s supposed to be a “  …step by step guide to server crushing traffic“.  I want to stress the  ”server crushing traffic“  part,  this piece was being pitched as a traffic guide, not a link building resource.  It  starts by outlining some basic and very well known ways to get traffic by various methods – blogging, press releases, video,  and article marketing.  In the info, two comments/issues caught my eye.  The first one was about  the effects of article marketing:

…”however, it was a bit of a victim of its own success, and people started to abuse article marketing – spamming article directories with crappy nonsense articles just for the links and search engine rankings. As you might imagine, Google frowns upon such things and suddenly links from article directories had little value” 

Huh?  Google is a bot, not a human, it doesn’t pass judgement or frown on  how you market your content.   One of the prime reasons article directories don’t pass a lot of link juice is because of the structure of the directory, not because Google doesn’t like them.  Article directories are a lot like general directories,  they don’t draw a lot of natural (editorial)  inbound links, their internal structures are heavy and not always well linked and they have a ton of new content/pages being made daily.   When’s the last time you’ve seen an authority source (or something other than a bookmark site or comment drop) point to content on a regular ole’ article directory?  Anyone?  Bueller?

But the advice given on directory submissions is what really got me going and I believe  is blatantly wrong.   The segement starts by recommending webmastasers add their sites to the Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ and goes to this:

Does anyone see something wrong with that “directory” list?  For starters, Zeal.com was offline for a very long time  (since 2006?) and just recently came back  but isn’t taking new sites.  (click the submit link at the bottom of page).  Looksmart used to be a directory but is now a PPC network,  so no directory submission there.   A couple others are algorithmically weak with minimal traffic making them not worth your time or money to submit to.

Keep in mind the purpose of this so called “report” is to tell people how to drive traffic, not build links.  If it were a linking guide then I’d shrug about the directories, they’re algorithmically piss poor but a link from them would count.  But to list several of them as significant traffic sources in a guide promising to show you how  ‘To Get Thousands Of FREE Visitors To Your Website” ??  That’s just not accurate.   

I’m not dropping this thread to be ugly or as a rally cry for standards or for any other reason save one:   this report and other’s like it are a prime example of the garbage floating around by people who obviously don’t do their homework and are looking for a quick buck or a way to siphon off your email for the real sales pitch.  Again, I have no issues with the way people conduct their business or email funnels as long as they’re pimping good info and not taking advantage of people.  But when it’s dead wrong or pitches ridiculous statements like this: 

“I can show you… The two most powerful links you can get – so powerful that a link from these two sites can vault you into the top 10 of Google”…

then it’s fair game to be poked at.

Before you invest time or money with any program, check it out and the people behind it. Any reputable company creating a source guide will disclose authorship and how it came to the conclusions presented in the guide.   If you’re not sure about the content or wonder about grandiose claims like the one above, go to industry flagships and start reading.   Spend time on forums, read sites like Sphinn,  Small Biz Trends, Search Engine Book, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable.  Industry leaders, news sources and top bloggers contribute to these sites, they explain their viewpoints and provide reference links so you won’t find crappy, out-of-date-and-plain-wrong information there.  If it sounds too good to be true or you haven’t seen it printed elsewhere, well…  hello… there is probably a good reason for it.

Here’s a list of places I recommend you get involved with, they’ll keep you update-to-date with what’s working/not/hot/liked a lot in SEM/SEO.    In no particular order:

 1.  SEOBook Forum (membership required)

 2.  Webmaster World

 3.  High Rankings Forum

 4.  SEO Refugee

 5.  Cre8asite Forum

 6.  Search Engine Roundtable

 7.  Search Engine Journal

 8.  Sphinn

 9.  Search Engine Land

10.  Search Engine Watch

11.  Search Engine Guide

12. SEO DoJo (membership)

13.  UK SEO Forum

14.  V7N Forum

15.  BlackHat Forum  ( yep!)

16.  Wicked Fire

17.  Small Business Trends

Yeah, I know… it’s a bunch of reading but if you want to stay up on what’s happening,  it’s necessary.  If you know of a flagship site (a site with multiple writers and presents news as well as opinion) or industry forum I’ve left off, drop it in comments and I’ll add  to the list.

 
Recently, on the SEOBook Community Forum*, this question was asked:

I built too many incoming links too quickly and tripped a filter sending me from about #17 to #95. Whoops! Not being much of a link builder historically, this has never happened to me before. Is it possible I could just wait it out? I will have some natural links coming in over time to sort of balance things out … it might not kill me since #17 wasn’t too great to begin with. 

Great question!  The topic of tripping filters comes up all the time, let’s take a look at it.

You have a website, it’s been around a while, has a good number of pages in the index and ranks decently for your primary keywords.  You did a little optimization and link building when you launched it so it has a handful of links plus a couple you picked up while you’ve been online.  Other than that, you’ve done almost nothing to the site and things have been OK ranking wise. 

Now life is good until one day you notice your little site with its handful of inbound links has slipped in the search results.  You also notice your competitors are actively marketing their sites and moving up in the rankings  while  you’re moving down.  Life goes from good to crap in a link heartbeat! 

So you decide to quickly fight back by aquiring a large number of one-way links all pointing to your home page.   Then you sit back, rub your hands together gleefully and wait to see your little site climb back up in the serps.

And you wait.  And wait.  And wait some more.  

Then this happens:   

“sending me from about #17 to #95″

Oh crap.

What the heck is happening?  Was I slapped with some +99 , over optimization, under-the-radar, anti-brand, bad neighborhood, they don’t like my hair penalty?  The bad hair thing aside, probably not.  You just tripped a link pop filter and have been tweaked for too many links too fast. 

Search engine algorithms are mathematical equations, you can’t add new numbers to the mix without another part of the equation being affected.   The little site had a history of being a little site with a handful of links so when big changes happened, red flags go up.   All of a sudden the numerical equation behind the  site changed dramatically which caused the site to tank.   When you add a lot of inbound links quickly and nothing else changes in and around your historically quiet site,  you should expect to see either no-or-downward movement.  That type of link growth isn’t natural unless you’re doing something  promotionally to build  links. 

But you’re not doing anything to the site except adding links.   There’s no new content, no increase in search queries, no media mentions (media = social and traditional),  no nothing.  Hoards of people don’t just give away links to a single site/page unless they’ve been asked/paid to do so,  so the engine assumes the links haven’t been acquired editorially and either ignore them or slaps you down. 

Ouch.

At some point time passes and you either add content/traffic/media or the time filter wears off and you see a little improvement in your ranking. Or maybe you don’t because you weren’t smart enough to figure out what was going on when you added those links to begin with so you kept adding MORE. 

The concept of link popularity is simple.  Link quantity, quality, anchor text and relevance all factor into the equation, change one of them dramatically without balancing the rest and the single biggest component of the ranking algorithm will start to scream and throw up flags.  Keep in mind link popularity is also balanced  by 199 additional ranking factors some of which include content, domain age, load rates and search referral traffic.  ALL of these things need to be considered when adding links to a web page/site.

Even for big/branded/competitive sites.   They “get away” with being able to add more links because what they do have established (their reputation, content, traffic, links, involvement in the media) continues to work for them.  Small sites lack that insulation so they need to be careful and remember balancing content, traffic, and links is key.

*The SEOBook Community Forum is  a paid membership platform and part of the SEOBook Training program.