In a recent “Whiteboard Friday” video blog post on Moz.com (formerly SEOmoz.com) entitled,
“Heart to Heart About Link Building,” Michael King, aka @iPullRank, passionately breaks down what he views as “best practices” – and not-so-hot behaviors – when it comes to link building.
King is a fascinating, fresh face and voice on the SEO landscape, a multi-talented and dynamic young guy who has transformed himself from software and web developer to SEO over the years. Formerly an SEO at digital agency heavyweights Razorfish and Publicis Modern, @iPullRank (aka King, aka MyCool King) currently serves as Director of Inbound Marketing at upstart digital and SEO shop iAcquire and maintains a thriving website and blog at www.ipullrank.com. When he’s not recording or touring as a rapper, that is.
The intro to King’s Whiteboard Friday video blog reads as follows:
“With best practices for link building continuously changing, it can be difficult to keep track of which work well and which should be removed from our repertoire.”
Now, that looks and sounds fantastic. But there’s only one problem with this sentiment and statement:
“Link-building best practices” aren’t actually “continually changing.” In fact, they haven’t ever really changed. At all.
What HAS changed over time, however, is Google’s ability to catch practices you should never have implemented nor attempted in the first place. Along with their eagerness to punish whoever they view as shady link builders and assorted Black Hat SEOs.
Here at the official blog of Amplitude Digital, we’ve blogged and posted extensively on this and other related topics. We even recently highlighted “Five Types Of Link Builders”…and suggested you avoid hiring ANY of them.
So if you read this blog regularly, you won’t be surprised to hear what we have to say on this matter. But still, it all bears repeating. Including the part about Google cracking down on the real screw-ups in our midst.
Of course, this is hardly surprising. Because, as King himself wisely and succinctly states in his video post:
“The people at Google, they all have Ph.D.’s. So if I can figure that out, they’re probably going to figure that out pretty soon too.”
And it’s safe to say King has some things figured out. Some of the tips King offers in his video blog post align with what we here at Amplitude Digital suggested in a previous post on staying out of “the Google jungle,” including spending time building real relationships both online and off, doing your research properly and, first and foremost, writing, publishing and sharing great content. And, of course, we’re in line with his wise suggestion to harness and maximize social media and its increasing power, pull and productivity in all of our lives today.
In fact, we’ve even published and shared not one, but TWO helpful and easy-to-implement ebooks on using social media in general, and Twitter in particular, to grow, promote and popularize your brand or business.
Still, there are other things that King signs off on here, such as “link begging,” for example, which still seem rather unsavory to us. Call us Old School. Call us Conservative. Call us what you want. But we just don’t believe that it’s wise – nor impressive – to go around begging for ANYTHING in life…including links. Even if King is correct in his claim that “it works like magic.”
In our mind, along with our extensive experience in the wild worlds of digital marketing and SEO, it’s best not to rely on things like “magic”…or any other kind of “tricks” – regardless of whether these tricks are deemed “dirty” or “Black Hat” or “nasty” or…well, you get the point.
Because, while everyone wants a quick fix and an easy answer when it comes to just about everything today, some things just always remain the same. Certain truths are, as they say, inalienable.
Like hard work paying off. And trickery and sleight-of-hand only fooling anyone for
so long.
Especially all those really, really smart people at Google. You know, the ones with all those Ph.D.s.
Here at Amplitude Digital, we’ll take Truth over Myth any day. And we’re pretty confident the kind of people we really want to work with feel the same way too.
PS – When you are link building for large sites if you want to build a great SEO Management Software strategy, use a tool like Linkio to keep your various keywords organized.
