Best SEO Blog|Launch your site.

I recently found myself in an online conversation where it became apparent to me that someone was looking for guidance on the right kind of links to obtain. I am paraphrasing because the issue has been raised in many SEO forums and blogs and mailing lists in many different ways. But really all those countless discussions about “is it okay to get a link from site X” and “should I be obtaining links from Y sites” and “how do you go about judging a quality link” and “what is a quality link” boil down to one thing: people don’t want to waste their time with the wrong kind of links.

So much effort to avoid certain kinds of links implies in the most powerful way that people collectively believe there must be a figurative or perhaps algorithmical right kind of links. The logical extension of this thinking is that we as search engine optimizers must practice a form of link apartheid. We must say to certain Web sites, “We don’t want your links because they are not the right kind of links“.

What is so bad about a link from a pornography site? They don’t seem to have hurt the Disney Company. Are you aware that many porn sites have linked out to Disney.com on their “Are you 18 or over?” entrance pages? Last time I checked, Disney seemed to be ranking well for its brand name, so what harm did all those pornography site links do?

And then there are the made-for-adsense Web directories (few of which exist any more because their publishers let them fade away or took them down). Time was, SEOs could not get enough of those “SEO friendly” links but now people ask, “Is it okay to get links from directories?” Is your site going to drop out of the index because some SEO friendly directory still links to you? Oops! You missed a link! What are you going to do, rebrand yourself and NOT 301-redirect your old domain to your new one?

And what about sitewide links? Aren’t they like the kiss of death or something? Well, who knows? I’m not sure I’ve ever had a sitewide link — except for all the links I put in footers on my personal pages for my own Web sites. Maybe they pass PageRank and anchor text. Maybe not. Those links are there primarily so that people know whose site they are on. And they get clicks, which is important.

On more than one occasion in the past couple of months the subject of footer versus body links has been brought up (in conversations I’ve participated in). I always say with some reluctance that if I had to choose, I would choose the links embedded in the body content rather than the footer. I would make that choice only because I would guess that such links are less likely to be treated with suspicion in general and are most likely to be given some leeway on a site that is already penalized.

But there are no guarantees. A link embedded in precisely relevant copy on a page that has no other outbound links (except for carefully placed navigation) might still pass no value to your site. That page might have no value to pass. Your page may not be allowed to receive value.

Many people in the SEO community are only just starting to realize that their favorite social media resources have been nofollowing links. Oh no! All that PageRank that was leaching out to the SEO’d sites is gone! And the anchor text — Oohh, the anchor text. It reminds me of an old movie joke, which I’ll paraphrase here:

There they are all were in the dark: the SEO with his technique, the Social Media with his priority, and the Search Engine with his algorithm. The SEO dropped links, the Social Media dropped in nofollow, and the Search Engine dropped all the sites that were providing content for its users. The SEO did the Social Media, the Social Media did the Search Engine, and the Search Engine did the SEO. Everyone died.

In reality there is enough content out there that the search engines will replace anything depending on devalued links with other stuff — stuff that may be depending on highly valued links, or maybe just stuff. Social media communities have become increasingly hostile to the search engine optimization community because they see us as parasites who only want to suck value out of their resources. And for the most part those social media communities are correct about the SEO community.

When you go running around the Web screaming, “It’s all about links! It’s all about lnks!” you had better expect people to sit up and pay attention and then do something to protect the integrity and quality of their links.

And that brings us back to the whole Link Apartheid issue. You see, now that social media networks are blocking outbound links from providing any SEO value, the SEO community finds itself in the position of thumbing its nose at social media links and saying (once again), “We don’t want any of those links — they’re all nofollowed.”

SEOs struggle to find good links because their attitudes towards links are wasteful, destructive, and toxic. Links are not a self-sustaining, renewable resource. Once you burn a linking resource, it’s gone forever. There are very few people in the SEO community who are in a position of acting like there is always another link around the corner. For most people that simply isn’t true. The more burned and jaded linking resource providers become, the more of a challenge it becomes to leverage their sites in your link building campaigns.

It’s really not the links that are the problem, here. It’s not the linking resources that are the problem. The search engines are certainly part of the problem because they use defective link-valuing algorithms to promote “quality” content (an idea that is completely ludicrous). But most of the problem stems from the SEO community.

It’s okay in principle to develop links for Web sites. You cannot be on the Web without links.

But it’s this obsession with finding the right kind of links that makes it so difficult for many people to obtain just really good links that help in any way whatsoever. The task would be much, much easier — and the SEO community would be much more productive — if people would just lighten up and stop trying to create perfect links.

The Frankensteinian link building tactics that the SEO community adopts with great regularity make us all look stupid and unprofessional. Ultimately the greatest risk we all share is that decision-makers will start to say, “SEOs? We don’t want any of their links.”