If your telling the client your doing high quality link
building, then buying the cheapest package you can from a
link seller, that’s fraud and in todays world, you can
cause serious damage.
The mom and pop store that got hit... It is a shame. But: This mom and pop store certainly has their own responsibility. Especially if they rely on Google to keep their business afloat. They are webmasters, and as such should take note of the webmaster guidelines [1]. If they want to outsource being a webmaster, the webmaster they hire should do the SEO hiring and guideline compliance. Having an online business is more than just putting up a website.
The webmaster guidelines are fairly clear on these matters:
Any links intended to manipulate a site's ranking in
Google search results may be considered part of a link
scheme.
Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any
companies you hire, so it's best to be sure you know
exactly how they intend to "help" you.
Yes, to me, this means every "high quality" link building program is suspect from the very start. Getting a high quality backlink from CNN or from 100 low-quality blog sites doesn't change the manipulative nature of these (bought) links. This makes the difference between low-quality and high-quality link building moot.
(Google) search is not a black box most make it out to be. SEO is not magic. Make a site accessible and search bots have no problem crawling and indexing your site. Create quality content. Read the webmaster guidelines. Google wants your content to rank on its own merits. Align yourself: simply stop buying link schemes, start writing quality content, and EARN those links. Optimize websites for users (of which searchbots are just a subset). Try inbound marketing and website optimization.
P.S. I am sick of SEO scumbags too. I am also sick of the blind SEO hate on a start-up site (start-ups often need SEO, yet a lot lack it). Didn't patio11 used to give actionable, and much appreciated advice on these matters? Do we really want to eat the sour grapes from someone banned by Adwords or Google ("Because Google targetted them, because their competitor set them up, because they got hit by those bloody quality updates, because they are not social enough, because they don't buy Adwords, because they don't use blackhat SEO, $insert_other_excuse_for_why_Google_is_required_to_rank_them").
P.P.S: The good SEO's I know often have their own sites they work on, or join an agency to work on big traffic sites. They are not using a cold-call phone team to get their clients, or stay busy optimizing mom and pop stores. This may skew the experiences you have with SEO's in general.
<blockquote>
Make a site accessible and search bots have no problem crawling and indexing your site. Create quality content. Read the webmaster guidelines. Google wants your content to rank on its own merits.
</blockquote>
At risk of sounding bitter, this is really not the best advice to share with any group of startup entrepreneurs who might believe it and stake their business model on it. As with many of us here, I've struggled with this issue for years, and the reality is that Google is a saturated distribution channel that is horrible at identifying quality content that is not heavily branded or pushed in mainstream media.
There are ways to tweak the signals, but it usually means having someone working fulltime on spreading word, and smaller teams building good sites often have better things to do than linkbait blogging (something I believe many of us would personally define as poor quality content). And even then this approach simply does not work in highly competitive fields where there is literally a decade of competition over search queries at this point, and competition from highly-funded startups and incumbents.
As always with SEO it is dangerous to make broad sweeping statements. What works for a small local website, doesn't have to work for a big casino/travel website and vice versa.
The advice I gave was sincere though. In practice I see many businesses aiming for links, when their content just isn't up to par. Quality content alone (without links) is enough to rank in many niches. If you get to the hyper-competative SERPS, sure, you can't escape link building or doing most of the work in-house. Droll: If you are about to enter a hyper-competative niche, you should already know what you are doing, else there is little chance you succeed.
For me, in practice, creating accessible content is still one of the best things start-ups can do. Blog about two times a week and you will rank for it, you don't necessarily need backlinks. If you got an inaccessible site with poor content, you need (probably to buy) backlinks to make a dent.
Disclaimer advice: Never stake your business model on uncustomized broad SEO advice. Especially when there are plenty of authoritative sources for sound start-up SEO advice like:
(1) Can you provide an example of a business with over 100k in revenues that has been founded in the last 2-3 years in a remotely competitive niche and is at or near the top of the search results for the most likely general search terms? How about a bootstrapped business?
(2) And can you honestly say that the mass of blogspam that regularly hits HN disguised as business advice is really high-quality content?
Vayable (YC12) - coney island tour (first page)
HelloFax (YC11) - fax (first page), google fax #4,
Lanyrd.com (YC11) - mobile conferences #1, ux conferences #2, + hundreds of other high value kws
TutorSpree (YC11) - tutor (first page), private tutoring #1,
ZeroCater (YC11) - catering in sf (first page)
MailGun (YC12) - email api (first page)
With some time, I could easily find better examples.
What you'll notice with these is that they are succeeding not by trying to rank for a handful of keywords, but hundreds or thousands of keywords. Organize and curate a collection of useful content of interest to your customers, and you will get Google to rank it. Most large aggregations of fill-in-the-blank are not well SEO optimized.
If I were building something, I'd look at a niche outside of travel, real estate, and employment, and create an aggregation around that.
Look at dogvacay.com -- launched in March 2012 ranked #1 for "dog boarding" in many markets.
Thanks for putting this list together. I stand humbly corrected, and am grateful for it. I'll take a look at what these companies are doing and try and figure out how they are managing it.
> the reality is that Google is a saturated distribution channel that is horrible at identifying quality content that is not heavily branded or pushed in mainstream media.
I'm really not sure I agree. My sister in law is a french tutor in a small English town. She wanted a Web site and I suggested that she put something together using Weebly. I did some basics with her to ensure that reasonable keywords appeared in the page names, headlines and text etc.
A couple of weeks later and if you search on "French tuition in town-x" or "French lessons in county-name" she comes up as hit 3 in Google - I think that's pretty good service from Google.
In my opinion this really is the easiest way for quality content to rank and I highly recommend it. However, and not to downplay how nice this must be for your sister, but these are relatively obscure terms that don't get many hits. If you are trying to rank on some of the hottest money making keywords on the web, the type with a 6 to 7 figure payday, then you are on a totally different level of difficulty. Orders of magnitude different. Old domains with old content are heavily weighted. New guys have little to no chance. Only extreme viral content can achieve that and hope to be white hat. It looks effortless in the wild but in practice you have a lot of work to do to link-bait and that's still hit and miss. That's why a lot of "SEOs" turn to black hat, and churn and chew up the search engines to scrape whatever they can.
If I'm looking for a French tutor in x-town England I want to find his sister. It's a win-win.
Are any of the people you are pushing offering a win-win in these 6-7 figure payday, or are they just yet another asbestos law firm, that wants the same 1/3 as everyone else, and will fill out the settlement forms just the same as everyone else?
It's an interesting question, and I'm really just an arm-chair SEO when it comes to the world of extreme money keywords. What I do know from experience is that there are a lot of these extremely profitable keywords. With a little research you can figure out what the top 10-100 keywords are, by traffic, in the world or just in the USA.
Some are totally 100% owned by big corporations who get the majority of the hits for that term and expanded phrases. Some might say that's legitimate because that big corp is the best result for that word. But there are plenty of other keywords that are owned by (formerly) regular webmasters who are now on top and fighting to keep it that way, with a sizable incentive to do so. These keywords are highly competitive and those webmasters will do anything it takes to keep the payday rolling in.
I agree with you, but everything you say about SEO can be said of PR. The difference is that PR is a more mature field and people understand what it's about.
It probably also helps that few have the attitude that they are entitled to news coverage the same way they feel entitled to traffic. So we accept that it's capricious and that someone who knows what they're doing can get results. And that's OK.
Anyway, who cares about "blind SEO hate on a start-up site?" It ultimately gets punished by the market.
If you hate SEO, great. Make your site hard to crawl chock full of duplicate content and inscrutable urls; don't bother to get authority signals (links) deep and wide; don't make pages that satisfy search intent.
Your competitor who DOES will get traction, funding, a better team, and down the road you'll be yet another guy at a bar saying, "Yeah, I used to have a startup... tough racket."
So, just for a laugh, crazy idea: say I have a site that I don't want to be on the search engines, but I still want people to be able to link to it etc, so no just putting it behind a login, I can do the above? Duplicate all sorts of crappy content, making sure in particular to mention the words "viagra" and "casino" a lot?
Ya you could easily do that and get blacklisted by Google and most USA search engines. Make the text the same color as the background, really tiny in the corner somewhere and spam it up. Though you could simply edit your robots.txt if you don't want to appear on the search engines. At least the ones who respect that. If a link to the site is found by a spider, the cat is out of the bag so to speak. Nothing can put it back in the box.
For many small business owners, they simply don't have time to be looking after a website in the same way you or I would. In many cases, web presence isn't make or break for the business, and a website is just one of many things they do that involve telling a company "we need X", handing over money, and getting X.
If you are the company whose job it is to do whatever they asked for - build a website, see if anything can be done to help improve traffic, install a gas oven - it is your job to not defraud them. Charging them to boost their ranking temporarily, knowing full well it will fall again soon, is fraud.
The webmaster guidelines are fairly clear on these matters:
Yes, to me, this means every "high quality" link building program is suspect from the very start. Getting a high quality backlink from CNN or from 100 low-quality blog sites doesn't change the manipulative nature of these (bought) links. This makes the difference between low-quality and high-quality link building moot.(Google) search is not a black box most make it out to be. SEO is not magic. Make a site accessible and search bots have no problem crawling and indexing your site. Create quality content. Read the webmaster guidelines. Google wants your content to rank on its own merits. Align yourself: simply stop buying link schemes, start writing quality content, and EARN those links. Optimize websites for users (of which searchbots are just a subset). Try inbound marketing and website optimization.
[1] http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
P.S. I am sick of SEO scumbags too. I am also sick of the blind SEO hate on a start-up site (start-ups often need SEO, yet a lot lack it). Didn't patio11 used to give actionable, and much appreciated advice on these matters? Do we really want to eat the sour grapes from someone banned by Adwords or Google ("Because Google targetted them, because their competitor set them up, because they got hit by those bloody quality updates, because they are not social enough, because they don't buy Adwords, because they don't use blackhat SEO, $insert_other_excuse_for_why_Google_is_required_to_rank_them").
P.P.S: The good SEO's I know often have their own sites they work on, or join an agency to work on big traffic sites. They are not using a cold-call phone team to get their clients, or stay busy optimizing mom and pop stores. This may skew the experiences you have with SEO's in general.