Johannes Beus
Yes I know, the title for this posting is rather generic, but I thought a bit about the problems and risks involved in the current linkbuilding-techniques and
this way the ranking chances for this keyword are the best I can not think of a fitting, generalized title. Searchengineoptimization as a service is growing at an impressive rate, it seems that nearly no week goes by without the launch of a new “SEO-agency”. While the part of the Onpage-optimization is extremely work-intensive for the majority of small to medium clients (coordinating with the webdesigner, programmer, implementation) or simply contains too little potential for large jumps in ranking, this looks quite different as far as the Offpage-part, meaning the incoming links, is concerned. And lets start with the problems ...
- Lack of market transparency – With its fight against links that are not set solely as recommendations, Google caused the complete marketplace to proceed in a direction which is opposite to the needed transparency. Private link-networks and sources are more important than ever while public marketplaces like Teliad or Text-Link-Ads are becoming less important.
- Uninformed customers – Thanks to the present SEO-hype, there are many customers who are buying SEO because “that is what you do now”. I am convinced that, especially in the area of SEO, the customer should have a solid basic knowledge of SEO at their disposal to be able to assess the performance of the SEO-agencies. I will not only accuse the customer, as I see it, the SEO-agency also has a duty to inform their clients.
- Short supply, high demand – I does not come as a surprise that the availability of “good” links is strongly limited and they are getting increasingly rare due to Google's actions. At the same time the demand for links is growing rapidly.
Any one of these three reasons for themselves could be considered a problem, all three together are currently leading to an excess that will harm the whole industry in the medium- to long-term.
- Conflicting goals – usually the SEO-agency will be the seller of linkbuilding-measures and, at the same time, consultant on the reasonability thereof. This is not a good combination – especially not if the client is uninformed but still trusting to be correctly advised. Here, it seems natural for the SEO-agency to advise with their own profit-optimization in mind instead of seeking the best solution for their clients. This is particularly true when – having happened more frequently in the meantime – the Onpage-optimization and consulting-services are rendered for free, if the customer purchases the linkbuilding through the same agency.
- Short-term actions – Solid SEO-measures have more of a 3 year horizon than one of 3 month. This does not stop many service-providers from capitulating to short-term target-agreements, which they will try their hardest to uphold – regardless of the methods used. This leads to the application of linkbuilding methods that anyone who is able to, at least, think partially clearly would never even consider and which will massively harm the domain sometime down the road.
I, myself am somewhat of a bystander in this story (I do not offer any linkbuilding myself and I only do a small amount of SEO-consulting) and I think that is why I have a rather unbiased and clear view of the developments. And if I see that apparent morons are pushing a subdomain of a big and old mail-order business with massive commentspam, that big and strong brands are receiving masses of dubious links from Russia and that myriads of students and “Texters” are writing up nonsense for articledirectories and webcatalogs, then I hope that Google, which is the only institution that can put a stop to this, will finally act and follow up their words with some deeds soon.
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