Link Building Block Link Buys: Just Say No.

My good friend Eric Ward stopped by today and left some sage advice..... Enjoy!!

I'm seeing more and more firms selling services that, and I quote loosely, "guarantee to get 200 new links to your site for xx$) This approach not only doomed to fail, it's just silly. Here's why.

Based on 11 years of building links for every type of content imaginable I've learned that every site has a different type and number legitimate topical links it can expect to attract and obtain. A site about dog adoption and a site about agricultural equipment are very different and the approach taken, while similar, will yield much different link potential for each site.

The bottom line for me is that it is impossible to propose a linkbuilding project for ANY site without first doing some analysis of the site, the site's primary competitors, the specific industry niche key players etc. Then, once this analysis has been done, you have a more focused and site specific set of strategies to pursue. Some sites might require months of link building activities, others only a few weeks. Anyone who tells you otherwise isn't helping you one bit. Also, anyone who sells "packages" of links, like "200 oneway links for $3000", is not helping you in the long run, becausehow can anyone say how many links ANY site could or should have, and how can they arbitrarily select a number, like 100, or 200, or 300? It's simply foolish.

If these services help you in the short run with search rankings, it's all based on fooling the search engines, and it's not an approach I'd ever use for a site I owned.The best link building methods identify the logical target sites that make the most sense to pursue links from on a subject/topical basis. Don't focus on engines or pagerank. That approach will fail in time and have to be repeated over and over, which may be what most of these block link buying services want to happen anyway.

Catch Eric and I talkin' links at Search Engine Stratgies