Before you think a link is golden, think again!

For those of you who are frequent link prospectors, you’ll often run into what you consider the mother lode. This is a seemingly untapped link that - with the right coaxing and ’strategery’ (thank you, GWB) - you can turn your new homestake into a golden bonanza for your target site.

For the right prospect - let’s say a ballpark PageRank 6-8 with strong backlinks - you’re willing to invest considerable time and resources. For some of you, getting a link on a PageRank 8 is a must, by hook or by crook (I do not condone “by crook”).

The easiest way, which is generating all the buzz lately, has been blog comments. Google clearly indicates that blog comments are a relatively white hat practice (with one or two caveats). Remember: Your comments should be relevant and on-topic!

For example, let’s just say you find a blog or news page with dofollow comments. You spend a good 20-30 minutes reading the entry and typing in an insightful comment (of course, with a link back to your target page). Shazam! You’re well on your way to a valid PR8 backlink — or so you think.

So where does the Guardian come into this?

The U.K. Guardian’’s cleverly (deceptively?) entitled community blog, “CommentIsFree,” may or may not have been on your radar. I know it was on mine. My plugins were all indicating dofollow comments. The page was being cached every day by Google. And spammers had not yet discovered this beautiful opportunity.

My ma’ always said: “Nothing in life is ‘Free.’”

That was all before I looked under the hood. The title “CommentIsFree” was a blatant bait-and-switch phrase intended to send SEOs on a wild goose chase. Comments were not — in fact — free. The links were hidden behind a snippet of JavaScript. I looked at the text version of the Google cache and the comment links were nowhere to be seen. It seems as if the Guardian is capitalizing on the dofollow blog movement to hurt the SEO industry (whether or not its intentionally malicious is up to the U.K. Guardian to elucidate).

So, moral of the story: be familiar with good ol’ fashioned “View Source.” Plugins that show whether or not a link is dofollow are convenient for first inspections, but it could also lead to fruitless and time-consuming endeavors. The U.K. Guardian is just one of many cases in point.

I’m on to your ways, U.K. Guardian! You underestimated the intelligence of the average SEO.

Photo by Thomas Hawk

You may have heard that Yahoo just partnered up with Google. I definitely think this is a good thing - not only to improve Yahoo’s dismal performance vis a vis paid advertising, but also to improve our credibility as SEOs!

You may well know that the cost per click has been steadily rising as more and more marketers pay for their traffic. This won’t change any time soon. In fact, the Yahoo/Google partnership will only exacerbate already skyrocketing click costs.

The average CPC is expected to rise, and the rise isn’t expected to stop, according to Jupiter Research.

So what’s an SEO to do? Pounce on it. This is an opportunity to show your client (if you’re a freewheelin’ consultant) or your boss (if you’re an in-house guru) that search optimization is free traffic.

It’s not only free, but it’s also more qualified and gets the lion’s share of traffic. Search engine users are 6X more likely to click on the first few organic results than the paid results. The heatmap knows all!

Granted, paid search is still the easiest and most effective way to bring in revenue, but for some revenue streams, it just doesn’t work. Where a company can really shine is in the bread and butter listings. SEO may not be rocket science, but it will soon become the star hitter on the field.

So, as we reflect on the recent revelations just know, deep down in your heart that it feels good to be a gangsta… dayam, it feels good.

Looking at the graph and the inbounds can tell you what succeeds. It will never tell you what fails.

People often focus too much on the negative. You can’t focus on negatives, especially in the realm of search optimization because — chances are — those negatives will happen much more often than the positives.

This is no truer than it is with link building. In order to succeed in linkbuilding, you need to know your successes. These are your places that you can turn to later, whether with future projects, or with the same project.

Failures, on the other hand, are not going to help you. You’ll find that, whether you’d like to or not, the failures will quickly fade from your memory while your successes are where your learn the most.

Case in point: I had a recent project that involved building the traffic for a kid’s website. The content was fun, interesting, and one of those types of tasks that SEOs envision as another cake walk. Building the links, however, was tough and I can’t tell you how many manual link requests I sent out to schools and educators. All that mattered, though — in the end — was that one single .edu link (like it or not, EDU domains are by and large still GOLD).

And the result? Traffic spiked. I still don’t know the source of that fortuitous link. All I do know is that the failures faded into memory the moment I saw the inbounds climb. All that mattered in the end were the triple sevens.

This is the official blog of Chronicas Media, a full-service search engine optimization adviser. If you’re a business owner looking to go online — and get ranked well — you can find some valuable information here. As always, we’re happy to help with any consultation you may need. Simply fill out the form to the left and we’ll get back to you as soon as humanly possible.

We hope you enjoy the content. SEO may not be rocket science, but you’ll definitely need to keep up-to-date. We’ve been successful at increasing our clients’ natural search traffic by up to %500. See our testimonial page for our accolades.

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Sincerely,

Jonathan Haeber
Proprietor
Chronicas Media