SEO, Backlinks & New Tricks
I was talking with a few other SEO blokes at a conference last year. One of them who will remain nameless but whom I respect, asked “Come on, who here can honestly say they have never bought a backlink?” . I was able to say “me”. I don’t mention this from a holier than thou position. It’s simply a case of me being a cheap bastard. As it turns out that has worked in my favour. I always investigated buying backlinks but never did for a couple of reasons.
A) I couldn’t be sure of how long the site owner would keep the backlink live.
B) I couldn’t put an accurate valuation on the backlink.
The era of crappy nonsensical backlinks is over but in the SEO arms race there are some new “bought” backlinks that seem to be working.
SEO For Credit Cards
As “credit cards” is a massively competitive search term I use it to get an idea of who is winning the SEO spam war, at the moment it looks as though it is the SEOs. When I did the search the number one result has a number of backlinks which are not “natural”. They are articles published at sites whose sole purpose seems to be to generate leads. These aren’t the old spun type of articles that are gibberish, they are articles with context for the site they are on and the sites they are linking to.
In the above case the article links to a credit card comparison site that is no.1 for credit cards. MajesticSEO discovered the backlink about two months ago. This is just one of several similar backlinks to the no.1 result. It’s not great writing but it’s a lot better than what we used to see for backlink articles
SEO Evolution
For me SEO is not about trying to find the easiest trick to get to no.1, well not for this or my client’s sites anyway. I’m not saying I wouldn’t resort to buying backlinks for the right project but I certainly wouldn’t be doing it if I had a brand I want to protect. Tricking Google is a short term strategy, which might be fine for a short term project. If you are in your business for the long term though, tricking Google is a wrongheaded approach. It takes your focus away from creating good content, which not only gets you ranked but also gets you shared and seen as an authority in your field.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
