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.
