I recently listened to a great podcast entitled “Current SEO Misinformation Seen Online; Google Webmaster Tools Warnings.” This podcast is hosted by Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Marketing and John Carcutt, Directory of SEO and Social Media for Advanced Digital.
I felt that this episode was particularly important because Ross and John discuss the cost of link building and how cheap, automated links from India and other places with cheap labor are no longer effective. Here’s an excerpt: (11:57 minutes into the podcast)
Overall links are simply not easy. If they are, be wary. There are occasions where you’ll get lucky and you might even discover you own method that gives you a decent quality link that… and that’s just because it makes sense. It’s something that’s logical. You’re not lowering the quality of the internet. You’re not spamming anyone. You’re genuinely adding value to whatever you’re reading or you’re writing. That’s fine. but otherwise be very wary.
Tell me if you agree Ross or not, because you deal with a different segment of business population than I do, but in my mind if you’re paying someone to get you a link, and I’m not talking about paid linking; I’m not talking about buying links. I’m talking about the work that’s involved in getting a link for your site. If you’re paying less than $100 a link, it’s probably not going to be a quality enough link for you to pay for that work in the first place.
Ross:
I agree. I totally agree. Although that it is a hard sell these days. Working with small businesses, they still hear so much about the other type, cause often times they’re behind. And the fact is, it’s an uphill battle trying to explain that. Hopefully they would listen to me enough to know that I’m not just spinning a story, but you never know. Sometimes they just don’t listen. We’ve imposed a whole new link regime which is all about creating excellent content and finding one place, and only one place and targeting this one place and getting them to post it. So it’s kind of like guest posting, but in this case, not willy nilly. This is targeted, personalize link building. We don’t get that many per month and they are definitely adding up in terms of hours – like four hours of paid time to get one link is our average right now.
John:
Yah, that’s common. That’s absolutely common, to get a really good quality link that’s going to count for something.
Later in the show (19:52 minutes in), Ross discussed Google’s Webmaster Tool Warning letters and tackled the topic of how having links devalued can have a negative impact on rankings:
Ross Dunn:
… Some of the links to your site are being dis… dis… what’s the word for it? They’re being devalued. So in other words, there are some links that are just not good enough and they’re being devalued. It’s like a warning that yes, you should watch what you’re doing but not a warning that your site’s about to drop. Now that said, if the site you got a link from was boosting your site a lot, that’s not Google penalizing you or anything. If it gets devalued, it’s going to inherently devalue your site and potentially impact your rankings. You can’t do anything about that other than continuing to do proper link building.
Personally, I appreciate this so much. For these two guys to publicly state that links built for less than $100 are probably not worth the investment, and for them to state that losing ranking because a link lost value is NOT a penalty, well, it’s just great to hear them say it. Thanks Ross and John.
Thanks for reading
David McBee
