Stinking Linking Thinking by Gary McHugh
How many times have you heard "A link has to have this PR or that PR to be of
value" or "link only to relevant sites" and a myriad of other "Expert" advice
on the value of links and reciprocal links?
As a webmaster myself I grew increasingly weary of hearing how "important" my
links were in the eyes of a search engine. Now this may sound brave or stupid
of me but believe me when I say it is neither. I could not give a FLYING HOOT
how important Google, Yahoo, MSN or the "Gurus" think my sites are and I don't
care what my PR is.
Am I completely nuts? Not at all, you see my sites have plenty of traffic
without me needing to worry about search engines. Sure I can always use more
who can't? But I am making a very good living and without a big advertising
budget or spending hours and hours on SEO.
Why do I say that I don't care how important search engines think my sites are?
Because in 6 years as a webmaster and webhost, Google, Yahoo or MSN have NEVER
signed up for any of my mailing lists, they have NEVER bought a product from me
and they have NEVER joined as a member of any of my sites.
The opinion that matters to me is the opinion of my visitors. It is PEOPLE who
buy my products and services and not search engines. If they like my site they
may even recommend it to their friends. That is what I care about!
It is nothing more than logical common sense therefore that if I want PEOPLE to
visit my site I need to get links to my sites in front of REAL PEOPLE! Even
Google themselves say "Build your site for visitors not search engines"
As webmasters we all need to stop the stinking linking thinking and focus on
what the REAL value of a link is. This is not rocket science, links are
valuable if they bring visitors period! One variable, one consideration it's
really simple.
In the last few years with all the SEO hype and advice links directories have
disappeared to the bottom of pages, featured only with tiny text links. Or
worse they have been renamed "Subscriptions" or "partners" in the hope they will
not be interesting to surfers.
What's the point in that? Come on think logically, again is Google bot going to
sign up? NO! Is Google bot going to buy? NO! So what is the point in going to
the time and effort of putting your link on another site if only a bot can find
it?
Oh that's right! It will improve your search engine rankings and bring you
thousands of visitors. WILL IT? Are you at the top of all the major search
engines for several popular keywords and getting thousands of visitors a day
from them? If you are congratulations! I hope you are still there when the
search engines change their algorithms next month.
My guess is if you are reading this article you are not at the top of the
search engines, but you are still hiding your links away and following the
advice of the SEO world, and praying for that holy grail of a first page search
engine placement.
Why webmasters hide their links is beyond me completely. What exactly are they
scared of? That someone may leave their site and go to another site? I have
news for you, that's what internet users do, they go from site to site it's how
the web works.
I have more news for you, EVERY page of your site at the top right has a little
"X" that will take people from your site. EVERY page of your site top left has
a home button that will take people away from your site. And those two things
you can do NOTHING about unless you are the creator of Internet Explorer,
Firefox or all the other web browsers.
Wait! I have even more news, the one SURE THING about ALL visitors to your site
is that they ARE leaving. I don't care how hot your site is, I don't care how
great your product or service is. I am not staying on your site for ever and
neither is anyone else not even you!
These days I personally choose (and believe me I learned this the hard way by
giving up a lot of traffic to follow the advice of the SEO "Gurus") to put my
links directory right there in my main page, and on EVERY page where it can be
seen easily by my visitors. You see as people leave my site I do have a choice
where to send them. By hiding my link section I would by default send ALL of
them back to Google or Yahoo or what ever search engine they use. I choose to
send SOME of them to other websites, websites who like me appreciate the free
visitors and in return send me some of their departing visitors.
If you are hiding away your links make no mistake you ARE sending your
departing visitors back to search engines. Search engines who give you NOTHING
in return. Maybe you even pay them to advertise now that's sensible send them
all your visitors free of charge and pay for some of theirs.
If you were to show your link section clearly, and I have a link on your site
there is a good chance they may come to me instead. And IF you show your link
section clearly I will certainly return that favor and send you some of my
departing visitors.
How I get traffic to my sites is nothing new, it is not some "AMAZING new
traffic system", it doesn't cost anything and it certainly doesn't require a
lot of maintenance once set up. It is based on how the web has always worked,
links and people.
That has never changed, my guess is you are just not utilizing that method any
more. I made the same mistake and gave it up for a while too. By hiding your
links you are reducing the number of visitors you get now, in the hope of
thousands of visitors later. Personally I'd rather have 300 visitors a day from
my links now than a "Maybe" of 20,000 a day some time in the distant future.
You can take or leave this article as you please. If you are an SEO "Guru" or
"expert" please do not email me I do not want to hear from you. SEO doesn't
work apart from for a tiny percentage of websites. Even if it does it offers
only temporary results at best. I have been there and done that. The FACT is
even IF I get to the top of the search engines after a lot of hard work or
financial investment you CAN NOT guarantee I will stay there. These days Google
and other search engines are changing the way they order their results far too
regularly to make SEO a valid investment of my time or money.
A dating site I once owned was at number 3 in Google for term "free dating"
after some very long hard work optimizing the site. Then in an instant the
traffic stopped when Google changed their algorithms in the famous Florida
update and left my site on page 56 of the results. It is simply NOT a good
business sense to invest time or money in results over which you have no
control.
These days I have hundreds of visible links on other sites and unless Google
can shut down the internet there is NOTHING they can do or change that will
affect the traffic from those links. To me at least that makes a LOT more sense
for my business and is a much better investment of my time.
I will tell all of you reading this article that I am currently spending a LOT
of time working with webmasters AND web users to stop this rot. You see I
re-discovered something very simple and very effective that works. It benefits
all my sites AND internet users as a whole, so you can be sure I am going to
share those findings not only with other webmasters but with surfers too.
I have written e-books and articles aimed at both groups of people, and have
little armies of both types growing in numbers daily. So pretty soon those
surfers will know about your hidden links (if you are hiding them) and use them
anyway. The sad thing is if you don't fix your Stinking Linking Thinking and
bring your links directory out of the bowels of your site, the chances are you
will not get a link on the websites of webmasters who are showing their links
and once again starting to work together instead of competing for a first page
search engine listing.
The choice my friend is yours. You can link for traffic or you can link for the
"Maybe some day in the future first page listing" that you have NO control
over.
My advice is simple, invest in a decent links program to set up your links
directory properly and get active exchanging links with sites who are SHOWING
not hiding their link directories. They are out there if you look for them and
they are growing in number.
Forget site relevance, how do you know what is relevant to a visitor? Do you
know all your visitors personally? Do you have some mind reading script I don't
know about? Just because they are on your widget site doe not mean they are not
a keen fisherman and not interested in a fishing site.
Link to any quality site that will make your link accessible to people. Give
your departing visitors choice of sites, they are interested in more than one
thing! A varied links directory is a very useful resource to your visitors as
they leave.
The advice from Google to link to "relevant" sites has always puzzled me. How
useful would Google be if it followed its own advice and only linked to other
search engines and those search engines only linked to other search engines?
Does their advice make sense? Hell no!
By getting just 3 new visible links a day on other sites, will mean over 1000
links pointing to your site by the end of a year, links that can and will be
found by real people. Does that sound like hard work to you? 3 new links a day?
It takes much less thinking about than algorithms, keyword density, alt tags,
meta tags, trends and SEO. It also produces results and leaves you free to
concentrate on the people who matter, your visitors!
Finally one last bit of news for you. If you exchange quality visible links
with other sites that PEOPLE can find, guess who else will find them? That's
right Google, Yahoo and MSN so you may well do better in search engines as a
result, but whether you do or not you WILL get visitors.
In closing please do not get me wrong. I am not against search engines at all!
I use Google daily, it is a very useful tool. What I AM against is giving them
complete control over my sites traffic. What I am also against is the dreams
being sold by the SEO world, and thats what they are dreams with BIG odds of
success and temporary results.
Understand this! Search engines do not like SEO either. They want to deliver
accurate results to surfers not the best optimized pages. If search engines
dont deliver accurate results surfers stop using them and they don't get to
sell the advertising that makes them their profit.
That is why Google and other engines are constantly changing their algorithms
to combat SEO tricks. SEO has just become too complicated and too temporary in
its results to make it viable.
Dump your stinking linking thinking people, start working with and not competing
with other sites and start getting visited.
About the Author
Gary McHugh is author of many traffic related e-books and co-author of
http://www.webreunited.com
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