I see one common theme on these forums which I think is holding back an overwhelming majority of the users who post here: selfishness. I've seen this attitude expressed by webmasters a number of times; it manifests itself in attitudes like: "I'll only link to you if you link to me and if your site has high traffic / pagerank." As someone whose first business was not a website or online business, and was successful, I learned that generosity is very important in the business world, and in particular, it's most helpful to be generous with your time. Being generous with your time is the key to getting to know potential clients and is the key to running a successful business. On these forums, there are a lot of threads where 10 or 20 people will post a reply, but it's evident from reading the conversation that no one is actually reading the conversation. It's like they're just posting to get an additional post with their signature out there. This approach will get you nowhere in business and nowhere in life. Instead, be generous with your time. Take the time to read other people's replies, and write a thoughtful reply. On these boards, you will impress other webmasters. You will get their attention when you listen to them and post a relevant comment. You will find that these people are then going to be much more willing to help you out, possibly by linking to your site, possibly by offering useful advice, possibly by giving you positive reputation on these forums, or by any number of other means. I have no idea if anyone is actually even going to read this post. I made it an "unsexy" title and a wordy post because I honestly don't care if none of the spammers on these boards read it. But if you're one of the genuine people out there, take it to heart. Together we will build a community of high-quality websites, built by people who care. And we will crush the spammers. They will languish in mediocrity and they will be kicked out of forums and have their sites with stolen content shut down and banned from search engine results, until they come around to the realization that you only get ahead in the world by being genuine and providing something of real value to other people. =)
RE the linking thing; linking out to a low quality site and not getting a decent backlink to back you up is a bad idea as a webmaster. Potentially, it is damaging. Generosity is one thing, risking damage to your own site is another. When you've been here more than a month I think you'll find there are many generous and helpful folks here, but like all forums there are also a huge number of spammers - you can report those simply looking to bump up their post counts by using the little triangle symbol that appears below each post. I do genuinely believe in being generous - at times, to a fault - but one must remember that it is impossible to have a community made up of 100% of people like this. Shawn cannot simply ban everyone who isn't generous and who takes time to read and write thorough and detailed replies every single time without fail; it would consume his every waking hour along with all of the MODs. If you want a generous community, be generous and report the spammers. Just my two cents.
Yes! I have actually already found a number of very helpful users! It's just a bit sad that they're not a majority, not in terms of users, threads, or posts. Re: linking, you're totally right about that! Indiscriminate lists or directories are never useful to readers, and linking to spammy sites demonstrates both to google and to your visitors that you are not maintaining editorial integrity on your site. I think that having high standards in selecting links though often involves doing some counterintuitive seo things. I think the most useful linking scheme would be: Always link to the most relevant sites, regardless of whether or not they link back to you. Do not be more likely to link to a page just because they link to you or offer a reciprocal link -- doing so can cause you to include lower-quality links than you would if you selected strictly based on relevance. Link to any site that offers a superior or complementary resource to anything on your site. Never withhold a link because it offers something your site doesn't. Ask: is it worth me adding similar or better functionality / content to my site? If it's not, then be happy to link to where someone can find this. People will then see your site as a useful resource for finding other useful stuff. If you're a business, link to your direct competitors. I've seen evidence that linking to competitors can actually help a site's ranking. But I also think it conveys professional confidence. If you carefully hide the existence of your competitors from your users, they make stumble across the competitor later and, if the site makes a better impression than yours, they may think: "Wow, why didn't I find this website / business? Why am I wasting my time with the other one?" whereas if you've been the one to introduce that competitor, you get to set the tone for how they view that site from the start, by how you introduce it. Furthermore, when the person who visited your site first later sees the competitor, they may think: "Ahh, that's the site that so-and-so told me about." -- which is great because now you've gotten them to think about you whenever they encounter your competitor.
Cazort , the Internet market where we compete has a fantastic potential for profit . But it's brutality an volatility means that there are no rules for anyone . This lead to far worst things then selfishness . The attitude you see on DP is just the tip of the iceberg .
I don't think that's at all true. Where's your evidence for this statement? All the evidence I've seen suggests otherwise. I think it's a cultural barrier, like a collective state of clinical depression, that people seem to believe that internet marketing is all about wrestling your way to the top. I notice that a lot of the people floating around these boards who are engaging in overtly spammy practices, and who are not generous with their time, energies, or resources, have signatures full of pagerank 0 or N/A sites, with no alexa rank. Many are full of egregious spelling errors. The users who are thoughtful and attentive, on the other hand, and who leave well-reasoned replies that makes clear they actually read other users' posts, seem to be the ones with the more successful (and more useful) sites. Volatility in search results is one of the surest signs that you're using black hat techniques. Why? Because the search engines are always working to adapt to these techniques. Yes, I would go so far as to say that "I'll link to you if you link to me" is black-hat. These boards, and much of the internet marketing culture, on twitter as well, seems to be dominated by a specific culture, a culture which wrongly believes that everything is cut-throat. You used the word brutality; that's a very strong word. Is it empowering or constructive to view it that way? Does viewing it that way help you to create the most valuable resource on the web, and help people to naturally locate your site? I have never seen any evidence that this is the case except in unusual special cases that are the exception, rather than the rule. My experience has been that if you work honestly to create a valuable resource, and are patient, and refrain from attempting to manipulate your search rankings through any way that would make your site or other people's sites less useful from humans, you will succeed far more easily than any of the spammers. And you can do so even with no advertising budget, just time and ingenuity.