News Source: http://searchengineland.com
Published: Oct 10, 2007 - 02:18 am
Story Found By: Wiep 1586 Days ago
Category: Link Building
13 Comments
Sorry this site requires JavaScript to be enabled in your browser. See the following guide on How to enable JavaScript in Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox and Safari. Alternatively you may be blocking JavaScript with an advert-related or developer plugin. Please check your browser plugins.
News Source: http://searchengineland.com
Published: Oct 10, 2007 - 02:18 am
Story Found By: Wiep 1586 Days ago
Category: Link Building
13 Comments
Upcoming Conferences
Search Engine Land produces SMX, the Search Marketing Expo conference series. SMX events deliver the most comprehensive educational and networking experiences - whether you're just starting in search marketing or you're a seasoned expert.
Join us at an upcoming SMX event:
- SMX West - Feb. 28 - Mar. 1, 2012
- SMX Munich - Mar. 27-28, 2012
- SMX Toronto - Apr. 25-26, 2012
- SMX Sydney - May 1-2, 2012
- SMX London - May 15-16, 2012
- SMX Advanced Seattle - June 5-6, 2012
- SMX Paris - June 7-8 2012
- SMX Melbourne - Aug. 2012
- SMX East - Oct. 2-4, 2012
- SMX Stockholm - Sept. 15-16, 2012
- SMX Social Media Marketing - Dec. 2012
Latest News From Marketing Land
- Marketing Day: February 10, 2012
- Report: iPhone, iPad Now Drive More Web Traffic Than Mac OS
- Drawing Out Your Affiliate Program Marketing Plan
- Is Yahoo About To Make Another Big Mistake — With Its Display Ad Business?
- Google Analytics For The Enterprise: Perception & Reality
- - See more news at Marketing Land -
Upcoming Webcasts
Learn more about search marketing with our free online webcasts and webinars from our sister site, Search Marketing Now. Upcoming online events include:
- The Inside Scoop on Automating and Optimizing Your PPC Campaigns - February 21, 2012
Latest News From Search Engine Land
- Google’s Recent Domain Registrations: Labs, Screenwise & AdWords
- Google AdWords Gets Shared Lists To Eliminate Duplicate Data Entry
- SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 10, 2012
- Now, Mitt Romney Has A Santorum-Like Bing & Google Problem
- Search In Pics: Google Sugar Cube, Yahoo Valentines & Chrome M&M’s
- - See more news at Search Engine Land -
Comments
Eric, you are absolutely right. The truth often hurts, but it is better to be honest with prospects than it is to explain to clients later why you’ve spent a lot of money and still haven’t helped them meet their business goals. Ethics isn’t an option. Ethics is the foundation for a long-term business relationship.
>All he knew was he’d paid thousand of dollars for a web-based business, and he was excited because he’d been told that he could build some links to his new site and end up ranking very well, and his web business would generate a nice income for him.Why not give him what he wants? He needs links and you can’t get them naturally - buy them. The client will get his ranking and be happy.
It’s really hard to have to tell a person their business model isn’t going to work, but it’s not just the ethical thing to do, it’s smarter for you in the end. If I’m a person who got hustled, when I get some more street smarts and find a legitimate business endeavor, I’m coming back to the person who steered me right instead of taking the good money I was about to throw after bad. It’s great that he will be able to retool, and that he listened to your suggestions. Sometimes people get emotionally invested in a bad business decision and won’t listen.
"Why not give him what he wants? He needs links and you can’t get them naturally - buy them."Uneditorial paid links can easily be replicated if your competitor can match / exceed whatever money you have in your bank account.A site needs defensible links - links that your competitors can’t get even if they knew about every single one of them.Yes, you can buy your way into the top 10, but can you afford it?"The client will get his ranking and be happy."An SEO’s goal isn’t to make a client happy. The goal is to make a client’s website a success. Ranking is only a cog in the wheel. If you only give clients what they want it may take them months to figure out what they want isn’t necessarily what they need. Sure, an SEO can milk a client that way but what a crappy way to make a living.With SEO, its always product development first, marketing second. If the product you’re selling sucks, then there’s no point in trying to market it.
>> Uneditorial paid links can easily be replicated if your competitor can match / exceed whatever money you have in your bank account.This is true if only your competitor uses the same link buying scheme and anchor texts that you use. Your competitor can not know of places were you get the needed amount of links so cheap. You can buy several thousands of links (of course, controlling link placement speed not to get penalized) for a price of just 1 sitewide link at Text-Link-Ads and your competitor will not be able to do anything if he doesn’t know HOW you buy them.> If the product you’re selling sucks, then there’s no point in trying to market it.The fact is you can’t tell 100% if it sucks or not, before you try. May be it is just what is needed for average consumer, and may be all other products that are now in Google’s top10 are even worse.
These template driven sites are notorious in my industry. It’s sad to see the goods some businesses are being sold.
"You can buy several thousands of links (of course, controlling link placement speed not to get penalized) for a price of just 1 sitewide link at Text-Link-Ads and your competitor will not be able to do anything if he doesn’t know HOW you buy them."That’s how your tn***.net nailed #1 for [text link ****] - with a big batch of .ru links. True, if you can get your links much cheaper than your competition, that does give you an edge. But with a big enough budget, they can be replicated. And who knows how long those cheaper-than-cheap .ru links will hold up? For long term defensible link strategy, you need more than those links to maintain your position.
I really appreciated the honesty in this article. It makes such an important point. Not only are there times when attempts at linkbuilding are pointless, sometimes whole business ideas are pointless if the end goal is to make money (and isn’t it always?). Yesterday, I talked a potential client out of investing in a website. She was already making as many of a handmade product as she could and didn’t want to hire on staff or sell a greater volume of her product. She seemed to have it in mind that she ’ought to’ have a website, but with no desire for further exposure or further profit, there was no point in her investing in this. She appreciated having this explained to her, actually, but it’s a completely different situation if I person is told such news BEFORE they’ve spent any money rather than after. Nice article.Miriam
"you need more than those links to maintain your position" We haven’t used even a 0.1% of our inventory to achieve this. It’s not about ru-links, it’s about links on individual pages. And this links can’t be replicated, because you can’t choose sites or pages where you want to place a link.
" We haven’t used even a 0.1% of our inventory to achieve this."That’s may be because you got affiliate bloggers linking to you."you can’t choose sites or pages where you want to place a link."Doesn’t really matter if a buyer is looking for sheer volume of links and doesn’t care exactly which site/pages a link is placed, does it? If you spend $100 on your program and gain 100,000 TBPR 0 backlinks - well so what? I can spend $200 and gain 200,000 TBPR 0 backlinks.20,000 TBPR0 links for $20 bucks:1. Since you apparently place multiple links on every page of a publisher site I assume even with a large inventory of sites some websites targeting a niche market will have multiple backlinks from the same site.2. I also assume that a good percentage of those TBPR 0 links are on pages that aren’t in the main index, in which case they are useless.
It’s hard to tell a client that the business model isn’t going to work, it’s even harder when its your boss ;)
I’ve seen a number of these types of sites: the site is template-driven (with your choice of "design" from a list of designs) with the same back end, the same content and the same tools as who knows how many others on the same platform. The site owner may have been "sold" on how fantastic this was, how great it looks, and it’s undoubtedly thrilling to see "your own" website so quickly, but:(1) the high monthly cost means s/he will be spending yearly almost as much as a unique website would have cost(2) if s/he stops paying the monthly fee, the website will go away, so ownership is a huge issue(3) it’s sitting on a server(s) with who knows how many duplicate sites(4) there’s no real distinguishing it from the other sites for marketing purposes(5) etc.Sure, you can spend time throwing links and PPC at it but, no matter how nice it looks, the issues above make it a no-win. The best thing to do in such a case, IMO, is to tell him or her the truth — that, as nice as it may look and as "neat" as the tools may be, it really isn’t a good platform for marketing. Given that the Web gets more competitive as the years go by, why waste time fooling around marketing and promoting a website that isn’t really yours, is a duplicate of someone else’s, etc.?
I agree with Eric here - I actually feel that you need to believe in a client to take them on board. That means them having a quality site/business in the first place.Yes, there are possibly ways you could get around the duplication issues - but I’d rather not sell my soul for the money, and try and focus on a quality service for quality sites.2c.