Partial knowledge is a dangerous thing. You have heard of Google’s Penguin update(s), maybe you have even gone as far as reading a few blog posts on the topic, not necessarily even the official version on Google’s blog or Matt Cutts’ take on it, enter the real world…
You have a site to rank, what are you to do in the post-Penguin world? Sure you could try removing links (which is, IMHO, Google’s conspiracy plan for you to out yourself and everybody else somehow related to what you’ve been doing as not a single person has confirmed so far they have recovered after being affected by Penguin just due to removing links – but that is a topic for another post), but what if it’s a new site and you have nothing to remove? Well, you have to build some links. But how do you build links that won’t get you screwed? Obviously, you build something that hasn’t attracted the wrath of Google explicitly yet. Or have somebody who knows better build these for you.
So what’s a poor site owner / marketing agency looking to outsource to assume seeing Facebook ads like this?
Supposedly the business advertising their services knows what Penguin safe links are, right? Does everybody actually follow all Matt Cutts rants against infographics and guest posts being abused to death and being the new kind of spam? How does one ensure the quality of the service provided if they don’t know the first thing about what’s safe and what isn’t? How many people out there actually know, post-Penguin? Ads like that one (the actual site withheld to protect the innocent) surely boost people’s confidence and trust in you knowing what you do, especially when they head over to your site and read things like “Our SEO articles have been published by SEOmoz, SitePoint, and Search Engine Journal“.
Seriously, shut the #$ &*@ up!
Nevermind that when they get from the aforementioned Facebook ad to your site, it’s not some landing page talking specifically about infographics or guest posting but just a general page about white label SEO services (what a targeted approach, unless the end goal is just to collect a nice email list to spam later with all kinds of other poorly targeted offers, which is quite often seems to be the model for too many similar agencies).
How’s a poor soul looking to outsource their linkbuilding to know how poorly guest posting scales? How are they to know that what they are about to get is either a slew of low quality posts on low quality untargeted sites or a few decent but way overpriced pieces on a few select sites that are surely nice to have in a site’s link profile but in the long run don’t have that much impact and won’t get the site ranking overnight? Only somebody who practiced it directly, and in the exact given niche, knows for sure.
And no, guest posting in the SEO niche doesn’t come even close and cannot be compared – it’s a totally different animal, with much different priorities and more tolerance to self-pitching on average than any other industry – at least we all know and understand perfectly well why we’re all doing this. Outside of that niche, largely, doing the thing properly is one hell of a job. Especially if you keep in mind that guest posting is not about getting links at all – it’s about building relationships… Building relationships in a short time for a bunch of different industries? Requires some serious whoring skills!
And infographics, OMG, all the tasteless meaningless unreadable shit people refer to calling it infographics… Don’t even get me started. So take two most resource intensive (if done right) linkbuilding techniques – guest posting and infographics… Scale it all if you can! While preserving the bloody quality! You stand better chances catching a leprechaun on a moonless night in downtown New Delhi.
It ends where it began
Oh, but there’s an upside to this story. You get a service like that to build you some links, once they are finished and you get to the next round of Google’s mass mailing campaign and you get a love letter from them telling you that maybe possibly you have some links that can possibly be disliked by Google but Google won’t tell you which ones, you now have something to do! Why, remove those feckers of course! The online linkbuilding economy has come the full circle, the cycle is now complete!
I’m only surprised we don’t see any Facebook ads advertising link removal services – maybe it’s just my luck? I surely have seen a few link removal tools being pitched here and there, why not the services? Or are we getting there yet?
“Penguin Safe Links” Bullshit Spreading Around
