A free flow rant
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Link Monkey….stupid people…..the jokes on those who have, what they consider, “link monkeys” working on their link campaigns.
Your link manager should be your “link expert”….an expert mind you….no freakin’ “monkey”.
I find many individuals who come to us who have been workin in obtaining links themselves, or by just purchasing links where their focus has been on numbers, and nowhere really on quality. Believe it or not, Link Style Pages are dead, and those are the types of pages that “monkeys” get you.
I also know of many larger SEO companies who try to avoid the topic of “obtaining links” in their proposals and contracts. When pressed, they will “buy you some links” via outsourcing to some “way sub par quality” party to “fill your link amount order”. In one sense, I don’t blame them, they can’t help but to give the clients what the clients are asking for. ..I fell into that trap too, but got out last year.
Since most people are still thinking “the numbers game” when it comes to obtaining links,  most people are buying “numbers” from “monkeys” on crappy link pages.
When will the world wake up that the numbers game has passed the tipping point in Google. Engine are trying to get smarter with how they analyze sites. My overall thought is that they are working to identify, simply, “Links within Content and Linking to Content”
Say that line into your head over and over, it’s “Links within Content and Linking to Content”
Yesterdays link monkey is worthless today. The teamwork of tomorrow includes having the site owner make a real resource. They need to give away information, give away free tools, link out great, add a forum, blog, Content, Content, Content (and all unique…and no machine generated crap),
This content should link out to trusted content within the text, and should be written about things that are good enough to get links. Newsworthy or reference worthy material. You should do everything you can to provide something of value that people would want to link to – yea, the things that Jill Whalen has been preaching since 1995. And Look where she’s now. “Well written content” and lots of it about interesting related things, has the best chance of ranking high long term.
To get back to “links”
Then, have your LINK EXPERT, work on advertising your info to everywhere relevant. They should add links within content, linking to sub pages of content sites, and should attempt to get links from within content of sub pages of other relevant pages of related sites…..that’s a whole art in itself. It’s “links within content, linking to content”.
Do you have a monkey or a computer doing your content or links? Are you playing the “monkey” or the “expert”? Who’s getting your links, and who’s writing your content, and how good is your content? And do you think any of this matters to your own link and content campaigns?
26 Responses
You may want to look at a few relatively new sites providing a fair amount of unique content, linking to related content mostly from within the content, and getting very few but good (w.r.t. traffic) natural links back this way … they aren’t ‘sandboxed’ – usually.
Sebastian – I was just blown away by your site and the content within. Where have you been hiding…damn! I just read a few of the best articles on linking that I’ve ever read.
Check out these articles – That’s a bookmark for reading!
http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/article.htm?node=148
Thanks for stopping by, and for offering some great reading material on your site.
Thanks for the compliments 🙂 I kept a very low profile in the last years.
Excellent Post. I think that SEO consulting as an industry will need to evolve to either teach people how to
1. Write and Build Compelling Content
2. Get others to link to that content.
or do it for them. The new SEO will be more encompassing consulting on how to manage your web presence.
After all, how much longer are people going to pay $10k for just basic on page optimization? (Then again, there is a sucker born every minute . . .)
Oh yeah – that’s it
It’s “links within content, linking to content”.
– add links within content, linking to sub pages of content sites
– get links from within content of sub pages of other relevant pages of related sites…..
that’s a whole art in itself. Agree – that’s why I put together that 400+ site inventory of sites hosting marketing content on presell pages at http://www.presellpageman.com
That is very common in real estate. If you see all the top agents who are comming in organic search they have link page with all junk links and some setup a network with page pr5 or pr4 and getting richer. In this kind of situation what exactly new real estate company should do. Buy quality links or what?
Great post. I have used so-called Link Monkeys in the past and been terribly disappointed. This is another good reference page (bookmarked ;)). I can only agree with what you’re saying, however I’ve found that the best person to do the linking is yourself. When yuo do it yourself you can immediately understand the general feel of the page and know that you’ve only been linked to from quality pages and on-topic!
Hello Jim,
So what do you think of article sites? Are they worth to use?
Thanks
I like this post, practically learn everything from reading you blog. If no one can’t understand what your talking aobut then I guess they don’t have the iq or maybe there newer. I was trying to explain something similar to some girl the other day.
Interesting post, quite a rare one I might add, considering it holds ‘the truth’. Unfortunately, there are too many “experts†and “companies†which offer SEO and link services and so, hundreds of people are being fooled everyday with their inefficient services. So yes, I can agree, links MUST come from relevant and similar content, it is a MUST HAVE, most huge search engines out there ‘can’ determine content from the links, the ways of reading popularity has changed and advanced massively. Therefore, ‘stop’ linking like a monkey, as how Jim wisely stated. But one thing is for sure, there will always be people that blindly go for such services, and let me mention one of them here. The renown ‘Get 10.000 visitors’ with 8$ or 10$. Do you ‘honestly’ believe someone will send that amount of real visitors for that cash? Those are scripts which “visit†your site from multiple domains/IPs, no wonder they do not guarantee signups or purchases, HELLO! So what I am trying to say, either DOCUMENT yourself before accepting such services or just do it yourself the old way, which is still the strongest.
Good article, Jim.
I do the Link building for our sites and now believe I am that “monkey ” Jim was talking about.
Thanks for the redirection
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