Do our tactics ever worry you?

Hi David,

Great post and issues raised.

Here are my thoughts:

Quite a lot of heated debate rages about whether backlinking is basically spamming or not.

My own position is that backlinking (Profile) sites clearly IS spam.

BUT...

On the scale of spam 'evilness', a profile that nobody is forced to deal with (unlike email spam) and that most of that community will never see on a site with banner ads and/or Adsense hardly seems immoral to me.

However, everyone is of course entitled to their own opinion on the matter.

Also, have a look at the backlink volume of most #1 sites (on Backlinkwatch dot com or in Yahoo Site Explorer), and you will see that those high-ranking Webmasters/companies have usually been VERY busy building their own backlinks.

The simple fact is that if your sites are going to compete on Page 1, backlink building is ESSENTIAL if you are serious about getting seen on Google.

On the one hand, Google doesn't have much else to go on in terms of determining which sites deserve Page 1 SERP prominence but through backlinks and on-page SEO - how else could they do it?

Manual assessment of every single site in every single niche?

Yet ironically linking to a site that a visitor likes is just NOT natural behaviour. I love sites like whatatop dot com, BBC news and YouTube's 'funny animals' videos but I would never NATURALLY think, "I love this site so I will put a link on my stamp collecting blog to it".

It just isn't NORMAL netsurfing behaviour.

And, by operating this way, Google implicitly ENCOURAGES artificial link-building because Webmasters like you and I have quickly realized that 'quality content' is not rewarded with SERP prominence at all!

How else therefore can we give our 'babies' (the sites in our portfolio) a chance of succeeding but through artificial linkbuilding?

Let the debate continue...

Go look at the backlinks for any of the top 10 sites in highly competitive commercial niches (ex: credit cards, fat loss, etc.) and see what you find. Very few get there without using one or more of the techniques you mentioned or other similar gray-ish techniques.

Here's the deal.

I've seen some people place their backlinks like this:

Now, I think that's pretty stupid, because...

(a) it IS spam.
(b) it LOOKS like spam.
(c) it has a reasonable to high degree of being removed, because it LOOKS like spam.

You know what, it wouldn't take more than a few extra minutes to craft something like this:

Looks much less spammy. In fact, there are several OTHER things you could do to virtually eliminate the perception (and even the reality) of spam, if you're smart.

Hi DavidO,

The very act of placing a link on another site, a backlink, is not in and of itself spam or grey/black. Just as the act of sending an email is not spam, however sending an unsolicited promotional email is the original definition of marketing spam. Placing a backlink purely for promotional benefit and making no contribution is certainly spamming or spamdexing. You can bet that the search engine's anti-spamdexing teams are gunning for those type of links.

Matt Cutts from Google's anti-spamdexing team is on record in support of merit based backlinks, links placed as an attribution for a contribution. Getting a link for contributing something of value is the purest form of backlink, the kind that SEs value the most.

Many of the link building techniques discussed on this forum can be used responsibly, or callously abused. Ultimately it becomes a matter of character, either you are a person of character or you are not.

A man with a knife can take money from people, is that a bad thing? It all depends on whether he is making a worthwhile contribution or not. If he's a chef that creates culinary masterpieces then he's a hero, if he's mugging people on the street he's a villain.

Which are you, a backlink hero or a spamdexing villain? Answer that question and you have revealed your own character!

Here's a hint: Search Engines love backlink heros and aggressively devalue backlink villains. To use another analogy, merit based backlinks are built on solid bedrock, while backlinks without merit are built on a foundation of sand and won't stand the test of time.

This is why I love the Warrior Forum! Excellent answers here. Thanks for giving me a lot to think about.