Buying links under the radar so Matt can’t find them.

ah….what an exciting week it’s been so far! All this talk about “buying links” featured everywhere. Matt’s giving the good ole Google PR advice, Jeremy from Yahoo is saying “I’ll sell links“, Threadwatch, Rand (more), Barry, Greg, Todd, Danny, and everyone else has been chatting about it. Matt’s even on Round 2 (not counting mentions in this thread) of dishing out the Google PR advice on buying/selling links. Jeremy has also gone into round 2 as well (not to mention his telling Matt to “Uleash The Fury!”).

So what’s my 2 cents you ask?

Buy ’em under the radar. Buy ’em where Matt can’t find ’em via association.

Find “Virgin sites” (non-SEO’d sites), and put your 1 link there, and move on. Better yet, blend that link right in so even if Matt’s prying eyes saw it, he wouldn’t even know it was placed there by an SEO. Under the radar I say.

Of course, getting a link for free because your content is just so wonderful is always the best – no one can doubt that. And in Matt’s perfect world of the web, no one would need SEO’s as everyone would just create great content, and people would link naturally, and Google would sort it all out with the best results on top……yea right. If that were the case, I’d be out of a job and SEO would be dead….lucky for me we don’t live in a world where SEO is dead….in fact, it will never die. The only SEO’s that will die, are those that can’t evolve, or that stick out, or that are easily “filtered”. The worlds best SEO sites of today and tomorrow are the sites that if Matt looked at them, he’d have no idea that an SEO was ever involved.

Even if you’ve got the worlds best site, with the worlds best content and the worlds best resources within your community, you can either wait for years for the world to find you…which is just fine….or you can perform some SEO (and maybe even pay for some links) so that your wonderful resource can start to get found (rankings) so you can start to get those wonderful free links with out even having to ask for them. (That’s got something to do with Mike’s filthy linking rich ideas (the real world we live in)).

I’ll always preach “Create that wonderful site with wonderful content that just attracts links naturally”. Matt should be proud of me for preaching this…..but I’ll also say, “let’s get the ball rolling by contacting some sites within your industry and see what it will take to get them to link to you….be it for “free” or be it in exchange for Pizza, or be it in exchange for cold hard cash”. This is the real world. My own goals are to be “smarter” about it by working to get links that look as natural as possible from non SEO’d sites.

I’m sure that right now Matt could find a handful of our sites if he really tried (I hope he doesn’t try). After all, Google knows your linking network unless you don’t have a network and you don’t associate yourself with any “networks” (for an SEO, that’s been “nearly” impossible).

So my new years resolution is to  get better at what we do which would include moving even more under the radar with our link buys – grab a link from a virgin site (a site that’s not openly selling “ads”) and move on.

Bottom line – As an SEO you’ve got to distance yourself from other fellow SEO’s in your link building.