From the Enterprise Ireland eBusiness Mailing list:
Blogging is a way of building the inbound links.
How?
You blog, about interesting topics (link bait). Then you put comments on
related and relevant blogs with a link to your blog / articles. You submit
your RSS feed to wherever you see fit, and you submit your blog to the blog
search engines.
Was any lesson learned from that Irish Greeting card blogger spamming incident?
Photo owned by greg westfall (cc)
I already have one Irish SEO expert in my sights to get a severe fucking kicking for selling a list with my details on it and telling the moronic victim to send me an email to try and get links from me and leave non-relevant comments on other blogs to build inbound links. If I see more lists being sent around or more bullshit comments from cluetards thinking it’ll help their SEO then I’ll make sure to flip the nuclear switch.
Enterprise Ireland, eh?
Another in a long line I am sure. It’s starting to piss me off too.
Unfortunately, as long as links retain their heavy weighting in assessing a site’s relevance and authority for search rankings, short-sighted or naive newbie SEOs are going to perpetuate the “Links are key, get them wherever and however you can….” mantra.
The power and reach of prominent blogs is unprecedented (this one being a case in point :-)) — which naturally makes them an attractive proposition in terms of publicising a new site, and potentially boosting search rankings. It just amazes me how these self proclaimed “Search Experts” can’t see that spamming bloggers is A BAD IDEA.
Popular bloggers tend to be pretty net-savvy online influencers, well connected in their particular online community. Not really the people you want to piss off. Engage, contribute and add value… if your providing really good content, and the blogger is interested in your particular topic (which you researched first, right…) then you’ll garner links on the merit of your content. But it has to be on merit….
SEO gets a bad press because a few unscrupulous or truly clueless practitioners peddle tactics designed to deliver short-term gains for clients rather than long term sustainable ranking. Sad but true :-(.
Yeouch. I’m no expert but I’ve been talking with lots of business start ups about having a blog, just to have some sort of presence online. But spamming…why on earth would anyone recommend hitting a list of complete strangers without any intro? It’s just plain rude! Would you go up to a total stranger and ask them for help with your business? OK maybe, if you’re nutty… Seriously though, I’m all for helping businesses and I get asked ALL the TIME for lists of all types of “helpers” – lads – just say no! It’s the honourable thing to do.
In next week’s email, Enterprise Ireland will doubtless extol the benefits of getting your brand and services publicly trashed by a peeved blogger. But sure there’s no such thing as bad publicity and on d’interweb no-one can hear you scream. And the kiddies are just mad for the linking and the bebo-book-oogle stuff.
What the short-cut SEO merchants miss is the importance of a long term relationship and sustained positive commentary through links. It is of no use to your brand if you are listed in the top 10 in google but 9 of those hits are telling people what morons you are for having hacked key influencers off by spamming bloggers.
SEO merchants telling half the story and focussing on quantity of links rather than quality of links do everyone a profound disservice.
I’m starting to think that these so called ‘SEO experts’ are just marketing people in another guise… they don’t give a shit about how results are achieved as long as they are achieved, and will sink to any low…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo
Rather late to this but of course SEO experts are marketing people.
Commercial awareness is what the SEO game is about + a lot of techie experience. And since Google turned links into a currency, blog links have a value too – tough, but get used to the new world order.
We did a short SEO audit this week for a UK golf site. Was previously generating £10K per day in sales when he was top of Google. He had used 2 of the top UK SEO firms.
Then he vanished from Google in June and sales did too (Before we got involved incidentally) A lot of SEO experience and about 7 marketing questions from us discovered the cause of the problem in about an hour. Could the world’s most highly regarded marketing expert done a better job at diagnosing the problem – I doubt it, so please don’t lump all SEO’s in the same boat.
Bad form Damien if idiots are selling lists with your name on it.
Great blog btw.
John Ring