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As Yahoo! transfers its search technology to Microsoft’s Bing platform, if my prediction of brand death for Yahoo! Search is fulfilled, many Websites will find themselves in the same undesirable position I am heading toward: dependence upon Google for search referral traffic.

Many people in the SEO industry have focused almost exclusively on Google search referral traffic to the detriment of their own and their clients’ interests. I can’t do anything about SEO short-sightedness but those of us who have maintained search referral diversity now face a problem of serious magnitude.

Let me illustrate with some personal data from Xenite.Org.

A year ago Xenite was receiving around 3,000 search visitors per month from Yahoo! search. In years previous Yahoo! used to send as many as 10,000 visitors a month but the traffic declined gradually over time. A couple of years ago Yahoo! was sending about 5-6,000 visitors per month.

Part of the decline was due to stale content on Xenite, a topic I’ve discussed in the past. I just don’t have as much time to create content for my science fiction network as I did 10 years ago. But we do still publish new content every now and then, some of it extremely link-worthy (such as a recent interview with Craig Horner, star of Legend of the Seeker, which drew in thousands of visitors).

So I know that Yahoo!’s declining search market health has been a real factor for many people. Nonetheless, I’ve never abandoned looking to Yahoo! for traffic.

Microsoft search, on the other hand, has always been a minor player for me. A year ago Xenite received about 1400 visitors from Live search. There have been times in the past when we’ve received as many as 1800 visitors a month from Microsoft, but I don’t really remember any higher numbers.

Last month Microsoft’s Bing sent about 2,000 search referrals to Xenite. Yahoo! sent about 2500. There has been virtually no growth in the non-Google search traffic as far as these two competitors are concerned. Microsoft is essentially leeching traffic away from Yahoo!. I expect that trend to continue, perhaps to even accelerate.

Our Google traffic is up over the past year, no doubt due in part to the occasional new content that Xenite continues to publish. Google typically sends us between 18,000 and 20,000 search referrals a month (NOTE: Technically, all these services send much more traffic — I’m just using data from the most popular referral URLs to avoid adding up long lists of referral data).

Although our search referral traffic has not exactly flat-lined, I don’t see much opportunity for growth in either Google or Bing. I mean, to increase search referral traffic we’ll have to add more content and, frankly, I don’t have time for that.

Yahoo! search referral traffic is dying so trying to improve my content’s visibility over there makes no sense, especially since they are now on a 2-year plan to phase out their algorithm. As Bing’s referral traffic grows, Xenite will certainly benefit from the diversity.

But what happens if, for some reason, Bing’s algorithm changes in favor of sites that compete with Xenite.Org? That pretty much leaves me stuck with Google.

You may feel good about relying on Google for your search traffic but I don’t.

Admittedly, search referral traffic only plays a minor role in our traffic building strategies. We get a lot of traffic from other sources. Still, I don’t like getting 85% of my search referral traffic from Google. Time was, back when I had time to focus on my own sites, Google drove about 50% of the search referral traffic.

If Google banned Xenite today we’d still get a lot of traffic but no one wants to take a 15-20% hit.

So what to do?

The only really viable search engine out there besides Google and Bing is now Ask. I haven’t tried to optimize for Ask in ages. We rank well at Ask but we don’t get much traffic from Ask.

Search optimization doesn’t just include ranking well in a search result. It also includes building a query space and enhancing a search brand’s visibility.

In other words, through the years, I have often advised people who struggled to match in Google what they were accomplishing with other search engine rankings to market their non-Google search visibility. This is a strategy that works very well, especially for sites that cannot rank in Google at all.

There are ways to promote your Ask search visibility. They can be as simple as telling people to “search Ask.com for Our Brand Name” or as complex as incorporating Ask search into your marketing efforts (keep in mind that Ask is a trademark so you have to be careful about how you refer to it).

Marketing goes well beyond advertising. It includes all your outreach efforts. Every communication between you and your marketplace can include reference to the search engines where you rank well. You can include Ask in those references and also give Ask special prominence in them.

The fact that Ask does a very poor job of marketing itself doesn’t mean no one uses it. Tens of millions of people use Ask search every month. You should make sure your sites are listed in and ranking in Ask. You should also make sure that people know how to find you in Ask.

Your goal should not be to take market share away from Bing for Ask. Your goal should be to increase your visibility to the people who use Ask.

And if you’re not marketing to Microsoft’s search visitors, you need to be doing that, too. I expect my Bing search referral traffic to increase substantially over the next 2 years. You should set a similar expectation for yourself and make sure you don’t do anything to prevent that from happening.

Maybe Google really does control 85% of the search market. I seriously doubt that (most searchers use more than one search engine). It’s easy to optimize for Google if you don’t obsess over links and targeted queries. It seems to be getting easier to optimize for Bing.

If you want to maximize your SEO efforts, then you need to think about ways of cutting inroads into substantial search market audiences you don’t normally reach out to.

Ask is the low-hanging fruit. It will take most of us 6 months to a year to gear up for Ask. In the meantime, we need to be casing the other search services to see who is coming up behind Ask.

Don’t depend on just one search engine. That’s the worst possible SEO philosophy. I’ve been negligent about my own sites but at least I’m still aware of where they get their traffic from. I intend to do something about resetting my search diversity.

What are you going to do for yours?

Web directories have fallen out of favor with the SEO industry because so many of them are constructed as made-for-advertising sites. I don’t see as many directories style themselves as “SEO friendly” as a couple of years ago but there are still hundreds, perhaps thousands of cheap off-the-shelf directory sites that get spammed to death.

A typical in-house SEO or freelance specialist probably cannot justify the work of promoting several small directories but many agencies with 100 or more clients may be able to justify investing about 6 months in building up a small stable of trusted Web directories where they can get client Websites listed quickly.

Here’s the catch: You have to work with niche directories that are not being abused by the rest of the SEO industry.

So how does an SEO agency find the right kinds of directories? Some agencies just build their own small general purpose directories. Some agencies rely on professional or business organization directories (hubs from chamber of commerce sites, city and county business directories, etc.).

That’s not what I’m proposing. What I’m proposing is that you pick 5-10 small directories, take them under your wing, help populate them (with both your own clients and similar but uncompetitive sites), and help promote them.

I’m talking about doing some pro bono work (or, if you can get the directories to sign up as clients, then get them as clients).

Web directories don’t have to be relegated to the slag heap of yesterday’s SEO spam. You can turn them into meaningful resources as long as you can maintain engagement with the directory operator.

Your objective is not to create the next Yahoo! or DMOZ. Your objective is to foster a relationship with a Website that provides a source of reliable linking. One site won’t help much but 5-10 sites can do wonders for a new, small Website or network that needs some link support.

Web directories can and do send traffic to listed sites when they look like they are being maintained. That’s the other catch to this proposal: you can’t build up a directory with a “build it and they will come forever” attitude. You need to make sure the directories you support are going to keep working over the years.

And then help promote them with blog articles, free articles, press releases, and links from other, trusted directories. You don’t have to pay all the fees if the directory owners are willing to buy the quality listings.

A good directory listing will engage with people through social media, too. And now that I’ve written that you know all the spammers are going to set up Twitter and Facebook accounts so that their new listings are pushed out to hordes of content-scraping robots.

It really takes less effort than you think to create a viable Web directory. It just needs to establish itself through sound marketing practice in order to build up traffic and search engine trust. And when you have that reliable group of 5-10 directories that you personally know and trust, your initial round of link-building can get results quickly.

You don’t want or need to submit a Website to 100 or 1500 worthless directories. What you do want and need is to be able to get a Website into all the major search engines quickly. It’s easier to add a target listing to a good directory than it is to go through all that link-begging that most SEOs still engage in.

And speaking of SEOs, there is one more key aspect to this kind of optimization strategy: Under no circumstances should you EVER disclose your list of closely trusted directories to the rest of the SEO community. Let them go out and build their own resources. Protect your hard work.

PageRank Sculpting Is The Badhat SEO Technique From Hell

PageRank Sculpting is one of those really bad concepts that just won’t go away. The PageRank sculpting model falsely suggests that, by hiding internal links from search engines, a Website can improve its search visibility. Since the idea was first proposed in 2007, no one has ever been able to show that it works. In fact, last year Google showed that it does NOT work.

You would think that after seeing Googler Matt Cutts come out and say “[Pagerank sculpting] isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank” people would get the message that PageRank Sculpting IS NOT THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAY TO UTILIZE YOUR PAGERANK.

Nonetheless, some rather surprising people (including but not limited to Rand Fishkin and Eric Enge) have failed to embrace the immediately obvious fact that PageRank sculpting does NOT work. Remember, Matt Cutts told everyone that Google “figured that site owners or people running tests would notice [that PageRank flow affected by "rel='nofollow'" on internal links had changed], but they didn’t.”

Completely Failed SEO Analysis Misled The SEO Industry

All the people claiming they were working miracles through their PageRank sculpting had absolutely no clue for over a year that their “sculpting” had been negated by Google. The reason Google disabled the PR Sculpting “Off Switch” was that “some sites that attempted to change how PageRank flowed within their sites … ended up excluding … high-quality information….”

Based on that absolutely awful analytical record, reasonable people should conclude that SEOs would not be able to hit the broad side of a barn with a baseball bat — even if one helps them swing the bat in the right direction (e.g. Googlers consistently and repeatedly advised people NOT to sculpt PageRank going all the way back to 2007).

You may recall that one of the early and oft-cited justifications for attempting to sculpt PageRank in the first place was that “unimportant pages” were outranking more important pages in search results. Rather than fix this problem, people in the SEO community leaped upon PageRank Sculpting as a hot new idea that would impress the masses — thus creating an even worse problem to mask the original problem.

Proof That PageRank Sculpting Harms Websites Emerges

For months I’ve been monitoring requests for help in various SEO and Google support forums. Many, many Webmasters have come out of the woodwork complaining about lost Google rankings, sites not being indexed, etc. (And additionally dozens of Webmasters have privately asked me to look at their sites through forum-based private messaging.) In nearly every case where I investigated the sites’ structures and backlink profiles I was able to show that at least one of several factors was the probable cause of the Websites’ search invisibility:

• The sites were using “rel=’nofollow’” on internal links
• The sites were using “noindex,nofollow” in meta tags
• The sites were using “disallow” in robots.txt
• The sites were using 302-redirects or other odd functions on internal links
• The sites had few or no inbound links
• The sites had obtained many suspicious links (comprising 70% or more of their backlink profiles)

On more than one occasion when I suggested that suspicious backlink problems might be an issue, Google employees tacitly agreed with me without actually saying that was the problem.

By far, however, the most common issue I have found with sites that have lost search traffic, search rankings, and search visibility is that they implemented PageRank Sculpting by use of “rel=’nofollow’” or “noindex,nofollow” meta tags on their pages. By preventing major search engines from crawling and indexing their content, these sites effectively removed themselves from the long tail of search.

How PageRank Sculpting Harms Websites

And by preventing the search engines from indexing all those pages, those sites effectively deleted most of their own accumulated PageRank.

POOF! PageRank vanished simply because it was never allowed to flow through the site, not because it “evaporated” through “rel=’nofollow’”.

Of course link-poor sites don’t have much PageRank to work with in the first place, so preventing unique articles from attracting and passing on PageRank is anything but an effective SEO strategy.

*NEW* PageRank Sculpting Techniques Worse Than The Original

Notice that PageRank sculpting doesn’t simply harm your site through “rel=’nofollow’”. Any method of hiding internal, navigational or cross-promotional links from search engines will reduce a Website’s search visibility and reach. That means that all the NEW methods of “sculpting” PageRank will inflict at least as much harm, if not more, on the Wesbites that implement them.

So using 302-redirects on internal links, embedding navigation into inline frames, using encrypted Javascript links, embedding “noindex” on pages, disallowing robots from directories of user-accessible content — all the so-called “Google-friendly” methods of restricting PageRank flow through a Website (now being promoted by various SEO pundits, gurus, and bloggers) are just as bad and harmful to your site as merely using “rel=’nofollow’” on internal links.

The noindex and robots.txt methods pretty much ensure that you are taking a lot of content out of the running, making your site less competitive, less visible, and less likely to draw more traffic.

One Plausible-sounding Variation Does Not Justify Badhat SEO

Rand Fishkin did propose consolidating pages in the hope of combining PageRank into fewer pages. Of all the 2nd-generation PageRank sculpting techniques, this one at least preserves the indexability of content — but then he coupled that idea with the extremely bad and ill-reasoned suggestion that people who have already dropped tons of “nofollows” into their internal navigation links do nothing to fix that problem (to leave the “nofollow” attributes in place).

Remember that SEOmoz has yet to publish a viable, credible test or report that shows they know how to manage PageRank flow (or even just correctly interpret the data they collect). So the recommendation to leave everything in place should be ignored (unless you’d rather just work on other projects). You can still love Rand for being the great guy he is. In fact you should continue to respect him for being the fantastic marketer he is. Keep watching the videos SEOmoz puts out. Just don’t believe them when they say that PageRank Sculpting (still) works because they’ve never been able to show that it does.

(NOTE: In the comments to his blog post cited above, Matt Cutts did say to one questioner: “this is a change that’s been live for well over a year; if you’ve got a site that works for you and you’re happy with, I wouldn’t worry about going back to change a lot of work.” While I understand Matt’s reluctance to offer generic do this/don’t do this advice — I am sure his comment is considered justification for the Do Nothing To Fix The Problem Principle.)

Badhat SEOs Are Compounding Past Errors With New Trouble

PageRank sculpting never fixed the original problem (bad site design) in the first place. All the sites that turned to PageRank Sculpting to resolve that issue simply made their situations worse. They piled one bad design decision on top of another.

Any SEO who cannot get the root URL of a domain to outrank the “About Us” page without blocking crawlers is completely and utterly incompetent, in my opinion. Don’t do business with those people, if the best they can suggest is that you hide internal, navigational links from search engines in order to reduce the PageRank of the “About Us” or other incidental pages.

I noticed with some amusement that certain pro-Sculptors never said another word on the subject after Matt Cutts pulled the rug out from under their snake oil SEO technique last summer. I hope they quietly went back to their clients and got those sites to remove the internalized nofollow code because in my opinion it is professionally irresponsible to leave that kind of “solution” in place.

The real problem lately, however, is that some people continue to talk about PageRank Sculpting as if it works. They clearly are ignoring the memo Google sent out and they are advising other people to ignore it. That is REALLY bad advice.

Goodhat SEOs MUST Disavow PageRank Sculpting

PageRank Sculpting is the process of hiding internal navigation links from search engines. It doesn’t matter whether you do it with “rel=’nofollow’” or “noindex,nofollow” or “disallow” or some screwy Javascript encryption scheme. When you hide internal navigation from a search engine you destroy crawlability, you destroy index visibility, and you deny your content the PageRank it is rightfully entitled to.

Is this really the kind of “optimization” the SEO community wants to be known for? Because if this is the flag YOU want to wave for YOUR SEO expertise, you can count me among the people who consider you to be nothing more than scam artists, snake oil salesmen, charlatans, and amateurs.

It’s time for the SEO community to stop promoting harmful tactics that bring absolutely nothing positive to the table. You can love your friends and conference idols all you want. You can promote their blogs above mine in all the ways you can think of. I don’t care about that — but if I were one of your clients who had taken your advice to sculpt PageRank — and if you had not come back to me and advised me to take down the “nofollow” attributes — I’d be suing you right now.

I’m not advising anyone to file lawsuits against PageRank Sculpting SEO companies (lawsuits are expensive AND the courts don’t understand this stuff at all) — but this kind of repeat bad behavior is what leads to lawsuits and legislation. The SEO community needs to get out of the PageRank Sculpting business as soon as possible. It IS a scam. I want nothing to do with it.

No one in this industry has any excuse for promoting such a clearly debunked and discredited technique. To ALL SEOs who advocate sculpting PageRank I say: Swallow your pride, get over it, and shut up when you feel the urge to talk about “sculpting PageRank”. You cannot do it, you don’t know how to do it, and you have no business telling anyone else to do it.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are strictly those of the author and do not reflect the views or opinions of any other person, party, or entity.

CNET is carrying a story today about a recurring FBI proposal that Internet Service Providers retain usage data for 2 years. Privacy advocates are up in arms over this proposal, which the FBI has made in years past.

Unfortunately for the privacy community, they lost the battle fourteen years ago when Congress passed the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Most people naively believe the courts struck down this statute, but the most devastating part of the law remains intact. That is section 230, which grants the status of telephone service providers to Internet service providers.

Large ISPs like AOL and Prodigy (neither of whom is the Internet power it once was, btw). Prodigy doesn’t even exist any more — it’s now a part of AT&T (which used to be a real telephone company before it was run out of the business by the U.S. court system). AT&T of course provides wireless and long distance telephone service in addition to Internet service.

What Congress did not understand (or chose to ignore thanks to the high-paid lobbyists who represented the interests of AOL and Prodigy back in the 1990s) is that Internet Service Providers DO NOT ACT LIKE TELEPHONE PROVIDERS.

The telephone company facilitates a transient transaction. Once you hang up the phone your phone call is gone. That is not what happens when you surf the Web or send out email messages. In fact, whereas the phone companies don’t listen in on your conversations Internet service providers regularly filter your email, block or restrict user access to certain sites, take Web sites down, and otherwise participate in the online usage experience.

There but for a lie codified by Congress is a huge engineering distinction between telephone service providers and Internet service providers.

The codification has also withstood at least a few legal challenges, so don’t even hope someone will come along and get it struck down. That ship has sailed and the U.S. courts — ignorant of how Internet services differ radically from the way telephone services function — have ensured that CDA 230 will be around for a long, long time.

So now the FBI is saying they need to be able to track our Web usage for up to 2 years to see if we’ve been visiting child pornography sites. And CDA 230 strengthens their legal reasoning. BUT let me clue everyone in on something: with a few lines of code I can ensure that many thousands of people visit child pornography sites on a frequent, regular basis without their ever knowing it.

You could be rounded up and hauled in to jail because your Internet service provider will show the FBI that your computer visited child pornography sites multiple times. All I have to do is embed some code on a popular Web site that takes the user to the child pornography.

You’ll never see it, but your browser will. There will be no popup windows. Nothing left behind when you close your browser window.

HTML is that powerful and it is capable of making you look like you’re visiting a thousand Websites a day.

A few years ago I worked for a company that had a staffing issue. One of the people who needed access to the Internet was abusing his access to visit pornographic sites at work. The company raked him over the coals, monitored his access, restricted his privileges. He was so persistent that finally the company began monitoring everyone’s Internet usage.

And that was when I was hauled into my boss’ office every month for several months and chewed out for visiting hundreds of Websites a day when I should have been working (never mind the fact I was the most productive employee he had ever hired). He knew I wasn’t sitting there surfing the Web but he couldn’t explain all the Websites showing up under my account.

After a while it sank in to me what was happening: I would frequently leave a browser window open on a major news site. The news site, unbeknownst to me, began refreshing its pages every ten minutes or so, thus reloading all its on-page advertising. When I looked more closely at the tracking reports I began to recognize the domains from my own Internet marketing experience as ad servers and related resources.

My heavy usage was legal and mostly benign (although it used up company bandwidth in the most slothful way). I solved my problem by closing my browser window.

But that experience taught me that user logs don’t tell the whole story. And since becoming more deeply involved with the Internet I’ve learned things that would scare a drunken sailor sober. You have no idea of how easily your Web surfing can be managed and manipulated remotely.

So when the FBI tells Congress they need access to 2 years’ of our history, that tells me the FBI is not ready to police the Internet. They have absolutely no clue as to what they are doing or talking about.

In order to mask their activities child pornographers could easily flood their sites with unknowning traffic from tens of thousands, perhaps millions of innocent people. Instead of strengthening its investigative powers the FBI is proposing the virtual dilution of those powers.

I don’t know how Web-savvy the child pornography community are. But I read the occasional news story about the people who get arrested. They include judges, police officers, lawyers, prosecutors, doctors, and even some state and local lawmakers. They also include people who have been hanging around the Internet for years.

To blithely assume that these people have no knowledge or skill in setting up Websites that are sneaky and malicious is to put the public good at risk, and that is (in my opinion, which is not necessarily shared by my employer or co-workers) extremely irresponsible.

On the Internet there are NO simple tasks and solutions. We are STILL feeling the repercussions of “simple” things that happened in the 1990s. We have absolutely no business enacting new laws that threaten to drag multitudes of innocent people into legal quagmires that will destroy their personal, social, and work lives.

This is NOT the way I want my tax dollars to work.

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this article are strictly those of the author and do not reflect the views or opinions of any other person, party, or entity.

There are some Websites where you can register, answer several questions about yourself, and self-publish an interview. You supposedly get some visibility and links. I actually considered setting up such a site many years ago. In fact, I set up a prototype and tested it with a group of authors.

In the end I decided not to do the site because I felt it would require too much oversight. Some people just do not behave rationally when it comes to promoting themselves and their Websites. They draw no boundaries. They respect no boundaries set by other people.

There are two popular “white hat” SEO techniques that people are using to build or attract more links for their Websites: article swaps and interviews.

Article swaps are the new form of reciprocal linking. Because the links are embedded in relevant content, the thinking goes, they will be deemed more acceptable by the search engines. Of course, instead of writing articles themselves, hard-core site promoters hire freelance writers to pump out dozens of articles every week.

Through the years I have often noted that the only real difference between many types of Web spam and legitimate content is excess. Too much of a good thing spoils it.

I expect article swapping to eventually be added to the search engines’ growing list of things not to do. There are just too many people doing it now for the brazen and sole purpose of building link popularity. And most of the articles aren’t even well-written. They are mechanical rehashes of the same basic points that earlier articles already covered.

Interviews have not caught on as wildly as article swaps, perhaps because people feel they should only be interviewing “noteworthy” people. Maybe you cannot find many celebrities in your industry, but if you interview all five of them you’ll have given your readers something new and different…maybe.

As I noted on SEO Theory today, Websites can turn out canned interviews in volume and I just don’t believe that is the kind of content we should advise our clients to create.

Most business sites could, in fact, turn out some pretty good interview articles. All they have to do is publish some case studies of how their customers use products and services. An interview doesn’t have to be conducted with someone famous. CNN often publishes micro-interviews with “people on the street” (or the Web). Other news sites do this, too.

You could also interview engineers or designers who have had an impact on your industry, or marketers, or other thought leaders who may not be famous but whom you personally sincerely feel deserve some recognition. There is nothing wrong with bringing your friends from college into your Web marketing if they can offer your visitors a valuable reading experience.

The SEO community sometimes goes in for interviews but more often it goes in for “guest blogging”. So far as I know the best SEO blogs that open up to guest blogs are NOT engaging in article swaps. They are legitimately asking people they respect to write custom articles for a single site. I’ve had to turn down several requests over the years for guest posts because Visible Technologies has not really supported that process (due to how it manages intellectual properties).

Still, guest blogging offers you a little of something that article swapping offers (other people create your content for you and they will probably link to your site from their site) and a little something that interviews offer (your visitors can see what other people — whom you find interesting — think about your industry).

Nonetheless, I just cannot see the average business site inviting guest bloggers over to talk about their products and services. The SEO community may not be wholly unique in this aspect, but I doubt there are many other industries where people feel comfortable writing content for their rivals.

However, if you are the business with an affiliate network, you may be able to leverage your affiliates in some creative ways. For example, you can feature your best performing affiliates in your monthly online newsletter (several major retailers have done this). Or you could ask your affiliates to interview you or let you write a guest post for their sites (just don’t rehash the same self-promotional shmucky crap for them). Some marketers have done that, too (mostly with canned self-promotional schmucky crap, so let’s move away from that style of writing).

If you’re going to be the star of your affiliate community, you need to provide your affiliates with high quality, unique value. Help them help you in the most Jerry Maguire-like fashion possible: put your heart and soul into the game and stop holding out for a bigger paycheck.

We have learned to create and use every type of user-generated content possible: surveys and polls, comments, guest articles, voting knobs, profiles, and more. We have done a very poor job of creating and using community-generated content.

When a community comes together to share an interest, people will ask questions. Someone should provide the answers. People will share points of view. Someone should challenge those points of view. People will celebrate their successes and bemoan their failures. Someone should be cheering them on.

Real community building does not consist of editing comments on your blog. Nor does real community building consist of bashing people who disagree with you — unless you only want to build a toxic community.

To create a positive, forward-looking community experience you have to go the extra mile and create unique, interesting, and potentially even useful content for people — and help them do the same. It cannot all be about you.

You can start raising the bar by demanding better performance from your freelance writers. Better yet, demand improving performance from your own marketing. Even if you’re just stitching together an affiliate site, you can find ways to create a good experience for your visitors. You tend to think they are only there to give you money. In reality, they are there to fulfill a need. That need unquestionably goes beyond making the purchase.

Engage with those people and help them help you in ways that help improve everyone’s Web experience. That’s the type of content and link building that stands the test of time. Everything else is just a spam filter waiting to be implemented.