Linkbuilding article in the weekly newsletter

[Xava]

Hey everyone,

sorry to bring this topic up again, but the current weekly newsletter from Developer Shed confused me here: In the article about what to avoid when building links, the authors list several good points, but some points conflict with what we discussed last week about links hurting your rankings or not.

Staying away from link farms and not looking for links from unrelated sites is good advice and can be interpreted along the line of 'It won't help you enough, so don't waste your time on it'.

But the authors say other things that seem to conflict with the strong statement 'Backlinks can never hurt you!!!' which I was told last week:

"You don’t really want to be part of a directory whose only criteria for admitting you is having a live link."
"If one approaches you and asks to link to you, just say no."
"If you own an ordinary e-commerce site, you really don’t want to have a link on a site that is oriented to sex or gambling."

So, are the authors of the Developer Shed newsletter giving out false advice? What they say here sounds to me like: "You don't want those links!" instead of "Don't invest time into getting those links".

[Menard]

First of all, I don't recall you having brought up this topic before; or are you referring to it having been started by someone else before?

Secondly, a lot of newsletter writers remind me of the people at parties, bars, and other public places who are constantly talking about anything and everything; they just simply like to hear themselves talk and a lot of newsletter writers simply like to see themselves written.

There was a post from someone on this board inquiring about backlinks to their site, as they were afraid that getting 20 backlinks in 6 months might hurt them and get them, somehow, blacklisted by search engines; this was largely based on poor advice (and I mean poor) they got on another forum which basically told them not to get links to their site but let them come to them naturally (wtf? ).

I read several replies from (so-called) webmasters on that forum which agreed with that...that...I don't know what to call it.

I am not a highly experienced webmaster and by no means an expert on web promotion, but I can tell you that the web is not too different from the real world; people will never know about something if you don't tell them. Backlinks are a way to tell the internet population about your site, as are search engines. Getting links to your site out on the web is additional insurance to get it crawled by search engines and indexed. If search engines are paying attention to links you have on other sites and indexing your site sooner do to these backlinks, does it really matter what these guys writing these newsletters say?

"You don’t really want to be part of a directory whose only criteria for admitting you is having a live link."

Wow. Really? And how can the search engine tell the difference between two directories with links to the same site even if one of them wants live links and one is human edited? They both have links, and, if they are both say...a pagerank 4, then they probably are of equal value where the search engines are concerned, regardless of what someone who likes to see their writing in a newsletter thinks.

"If one approaches you and asks to link to you, just say no."

Well dangies; I guess I should never have accepted that two for one link exchange (I got two links for giving them one) on a higher ranked site with backing simply because they liked my site and felt that it would be a good exchange for the traffic draw. I really wished I had listened to advice like this before I made that exchange and ended up with two links on a much stronger site.

"If you own an ordinary e-commerce site, you really don’t want to have a link on a site that is oriented to a barbeque or gambling."

Uh...please...could someone provide a definition of ordinary e-commerce site, please? Although I am one to believe there is something to the suggestion of getting backlinks on like sites is better than getting it on sites with dissimilar content due to the fact that so many webmasters say it, so many webmasters also believe, and tell others, that the revisit metatag is real, when in reality it was created and only used by searchBC (no longer extant) and is completely useless with any other search engine. If I had a website about say...feminine napkins (okay guys, you know me, there is no telling what I might create a site about) and a webmaster of gambling site with a PR5 had me linked on it because he is a fan of feminine napkins (okay..stay with me on this), I am not going to complain; it is a link on a PR5 site, and I'll take it.

I am not saying to completely ignore what these guys write, as, I presume, they have some experience with what they are talking about. If, however, you feel that something you are reading flies in the face of common sense, or is contrary to your own experience, well, as the old saying goes, follow your gut.