I'm currently subscribed to the
developershed newsletter. I mainly get them for the programming articles but having just read the emails from the past few months and it was a couple of SEO articles that really caught my attention.
The SEO field is great in that a lot of people are willing to share what they know. It's possible to take a sceptical perspective and say they're only looking to build their mind-share and brand but there is still good information out there. Brands are being made by offering real value.
This is why these two articles stuck out. These articles were not about valuable content. They were about self-promotion all the way.
Reciprocal Linking
The first article was about
reciprocal linking and this quote sets the scene.
There are three primary linking strategies:
1. Reciprocal Linking
2. Purchasing text links
3. Employing a link finding service
Notice there is nothing here about writing great content that people want to link to.
Exchanging reciprocal links with other sites will build a great link directory that will motivate visitors to bookmark your website to get access to your link directory.
My bookmark list includes 522 links. I may be unusual but not one of them is to a directory. There is another problem with this. If you are putting your links in a directory then everyone linking to you will also likely be putting your link in a directory structure. The search engines are just going to be presented with a sea of links and very little way of putting them in some sort of context. They aren't going to help your rankings.
After this shaky start the article does get better in parts. Suggesting getting links from pages with as few links as possible, getting links from sites with related content etc
For me though it is the final paragraph which really finishes the article on a high.
Remember the most important benefit of a link exchange is the traffic resulting directly from these links. Search engines are highly unpredictable. They keep changing their algorithms every now and then. Your site is on the top 10 results today but it may not be so tomorrow. Of course, you don't want to exclude search engine optimization but your main concern should be getting traffic from direct links.
The algorithms do keep changing. One of those changes is to increasingly devalue reciprocal links.
Directory Submissions
There are many ways by which a website can get high rankings in major search engines. One such important method is directory submission.
Not if you are in an even moderately competitive field and this is all you're doing.
Since these [search engine] robots visit directories more often than other sites, probability remains high that your site will be indexed soon.
The search engines determine how often to crawl a page, as far as I'm aware, based on two factors. Firstly the importance of the page and secondly how frequently it is updated. Directory pages generally are not updated that often and the importance given to the inner pages of a directory generally isn't that high. Unless new links are displayed on the homepage of the directory I really don't think this true.
In essence, directory submission is a central part of any SEO effort. Without submitting a site in relevant directories, one cannot hope to garner high rankings in search engines. Thus, one must definitely go for directory submissions since the time and effort is worth it.
No it isn't. Yes one can. No one mustn't.
Self-promotion is great
It probably won't surprise you to learn that the author of the previous article offers a directory submission service. For just $30 you can get your site listed in 170 directories.
I don't claim to be an expert but I know enough to realise when I'm being told nonsense. These articles were nonsense. The disturbing thing is that people new to the industry will see these articles, and other similar articles (mostly written a year or more ago), and assume it is good advice. I guess the stream of confused people at the various seo forums isn't about to vanish any time soon.
