Are Your Link-Building Tactics Failing? Don't Blame Google

Jan 8, 2008 - 10:05 am 1 by
Filed Under Link Building

Eric Ward wrote a wonderful piece at Search Engine Land about the fallacies of link building beliefs.

The summary, as written by Chris Sherman, is as follows:

Many of you have had your entire portfolio of clients blown up because you relied on several core link building tactics that were doomed to fail. Your job now should not be to blame Google for your situation, but to recognize what matters now, what may matter then, and give sound advice to the clients who put their confidence in us and food on our tables.

Thanks, Eric, for the writeup. There's an incredible amount of supporters for Eric's statement.

One Sphinn member is happy to see that these issues are being addressed:

Thank you for writing this. I'm sharing it with my co-workers who are spending bucks on services that I consider to be nothing more than a link farm.

The bottom line is that Eric is a proponent of hard work. You can't build links with a simple download or by outsourcing a bunch of newbie SEOs in the far East. There's a lot of practice involved.

Probably stating the obvious, but many of those who have attacked your philosophy on link building want neatly packaged answers and/or shortcuts.

So be careful, SEO types. It's your responsibility in the end:

I can understand how ordinary webmasters might want to vent about Google, but if SEO/link building is your business, then doing what you think is ok, getting a client penalized, then blaming Google is what I call incompetence.

The only question that remains is what links do count? If link baiting and article marketing don't work (which forum members seem to have a problem with), what's the best approach? Asking via email doesn't always resonate. Some people might like different approaches.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: July 1, 2025

Jul 1, 2025 - 10:00 am
Google Updates

Google June 2025 Core Update Is Rolling Out - What We're Seeing So Far

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

New Google Search Console Insights Report

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:41 am
Spiders

Cloudflare To Block AI Crawlers By Default & Pay Per Crawl Model

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:31 am
Bing Search

Who Ate The Bing Search Results

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:21 am
Google AdSense

Google AdSense New Privacy Law & Opt-Out Mechanism

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:11 am
Previous Story: Google Checkout Transaction Fees Start February 1, 2008