Strategies for effective reference campaigns

To speak on this topic was not very comfortable, because recently SEOmoz company publicly announced its negative attitude to the "corrupt" links.

But since the organizers of the conference considered that it would be interesting for the visitors, they asked the report to address this issue as objectively as possible.

Paid links vs. natural links

Not surprisingly, after the conference, many of the people sitting in the conference room approached me to discuss this issue in more detail. Even after returning to Seattle, I continued to receive letters about my presentation. Of course, I really appreciate that people express their opinion about my ideas, sometimes these are very valuable comments.

Let's return to the conference, the presentation started a little late, technical problems with the projector, so I had to sacrifice the last part of my speech in which I had to answer questions from the audience about my report. To somehow compensate for this omission, I decided in my post to answer the questions that I received after the conference and by e-mail.

Since I am familiar with some of Google’s employees, those who work in the anti-spam department, I’m well aware of the sanctions that search engines take on such sites, the consequences can really be very sad, my answer to this question is definitely not.

Moreover, I have never advised buying links on stock exchanges or in any other form, just to raise the position of the site in the CEPA in this way. In truth, many of my colleagues have a different opinion, especially those whose work is related to highly competitive business segments (gambling, computer games, medicine, real estate, e-commerce, etc.).

I even know some optimizers from Fortune 500 who regularly buy exchanges on the exchanges for some pages or keywords that are in the zone of least risk.

Even in spite of these examples, always when people ask me about my opinion about the "sales" links, my answer is: for the long term and to eliminate the opportunity to get under the search engine filter, it’s better to attract links naturally than to buy them.

Sanctions and other problems associated with the purchase links simply negate all the advantages that seem to exist, so when my conscience is clear of using such links, I can sleep well and not worry that tomorrow I’ll go to my Google ban some important project.

In short, here it is necessary to deal with each specific case. I would invest in directories, which, despite being paid, but still have a very positive effect on the ranking. Here are some of them:

• The Yahoo! Directory
• Directory The Better Business Bureau
• SEMPO's Member Directory
• Apple's Web Apps Catalog

of course, with reference to the Internet, we can add the Yandex directory and the Mail.Ru directory.

But there is a reverse side of the coin, there are a huge number of directories that are created only for cheating PageRank.

A few years ago, Google launched a large-scale campaign to identify and neutralize the reference weight transmitted by such directories.

The basic idea here is this: despite the fact that you pay for placing links in such directories, the search engine does not consider such links to be “corrupt”, so you can not be afraid of sanctions on its part for such an action.

As with everything else, on the Internet and in SEO in particular, there are a lot of "gray" nuances that require special attention so that later not to get huge problems. SEO is not as simple as it seems at first glance.

I think the biggest problem here is that most optimizers do not really understand the principle of transferring reference weight.

When analyzing the reference mass of competitors by SERP, optimizers often use various tools, among which Yahoo! Site Explorer and Linkscape , in reality, these tools help determine only the number of links but not the quality.

A huge number of incoming links does not mean anything. There have been cases when only a few fairly “powerful” links made it possible to bypass competitors and rise to the very top of search results.

I remember the site of one clinic, a few years ago, the head of the anti-spam department at Google, Matt Cutts, showed me how reference weight works in practice. This site contained several hundreds of incoming links, using internal software, it filtered links, it turned out that only three (yes, you heard right three!) Of them transmitted reference weight, all the others turned out to be “empty spaces” that were absolutely useless, and did not affect the ranking.

Naturally, Google is a search giant, and it has great potential, including by the gradation of links.

Even if you are sure that with the help of purchase links you can win the “first fight”, I still insist that you follow the path of least risk, so you can stay on the road for much longer, and those who have a rapid rise at the start with the help of buying links, quickly go the distance.

This is a rather complicated question, since it is impossible to give a definite answer to it.

However, for a long time in the SEO industry, I worked out certain rules that help me to determine with certainty which links can be considered “purchased” and for which sanctions are possible for search engines, and which can be attributed to natural ones without fear of any consequences. To do this, answer the following three questions:

• The main purpose of placing paid links wrapping puzomerok?
• Does the money go for something other than the links themselves?
• Subject sites to which are "white" methods of buying links (sponsorship, charity, advertising partnership) to be in the "black" segment (online casinos, pharma, etc ...)?

If the answer to at least one of these questions is "yes", then the source has every chance of getting into the Google blacklist with the subsequent loss of the ability to transmit reference weight.

Naturally, all optimizers strive to get as many incoming links as possible and sometimes they find it difficult to resist using non-legal methods, therefore search engines keep a close eye on everything that happens by linking the reference masses, reserving the right to stop one or another of the ways reference mass which in their opinion may seem manipulative.

But I am sure that if you use high-quality and original content to attract new incoming links, then you have nothing to fear, because this is in the interests of the search engines themselves.

But we have already done it! There is only one reason why we attract inbound links to our site, carefully compile the semantic core, create XML sitemaps, etc.

This is all done because Google dictates its own rules of the game. And we must comply with them, if we do not agree with this then we have nothing to do in SEO. Google is a search giant that in the Internet ecosystem occupies almost the main role controlling 85% + of all search traffic. And if you do not want to play by his rules, then you definitely lost.

Nobody says that gray-black methods of building up a link mass do not mean anything, they may even be very effective, but using them you do not play by the rules and be prepared for the fact that sooner or later you will be thrown out of the field of play.