First, some commercial sites cannot get top rankings without reciprocals. They'd have to buy too many links, while reciprocals are time consuming, they don't cost money. My first site is a commercial one and no one gives a crap about linking to it. Way back when I was a noob, Jill's site was one of the ones to visit and I frowned upon link exchanges partly because of Jill's site. Well, that site got zero rankings until I started link exchanges. It seems the more I swap, the better rankings I get. When I get lazy, my site drops slowly in the rankings, because all competitors work hard on link building. Of course, great content/tool sites get links naturally. The point is Jill cannot write even a "Hello World" program, but is considered by many a top SEO expert and sometimes comments on the inner workings of search engines, which is ridiculous. Some of her old posts are full of nonsense, and she never did anything original. Of course, she learned the art of talking common sense SEO and no get in trouble by saying anything too specific. I think her success is based on a few factors: 1. she started early; 2. Amazingly she is good friends with some influential people in the SEO business. I think factor 1 (time) is the most important one. Start a site early in an emerging business and you are almost guaranteed to be a top dog. Start a webmaster business early and you are almost guaranteed you'll make more money than people starting sites years later. That's how it works. Jill's the living proof that the time factor is probably the most important in an online business. I guess some people are annoyed by Jill's success. So what?
This is a very funny thread. The self proclaimed SEO Bitch can still start up a heated controversy. We should all ignore her and hope that she goes away like our friend Anthony.
Who the fuck gave me a negative rep for this post and didn't have the guts to sign it? She did proclaim herself the SEO Bitch and registered a web site to brag about it. She has since taken the site down. I'd like to know who the chicken shit, lily livered, coward is who negative repped me for telling the truth and didn't have the intestinal fortitude to sign it. Fucking coward!
So if they don't know why would they negative rep me. And I wouldn't even care if they would just sign it. I purposely did not include the links to the web sites that attack her. I simple commented on her ability to stir up controversy. A negative rep for this is totally uncalled for. And an unsigned negative rep is completely cowardly and unexceptable. I'm pissed, and I'll stay pissed until this person identifies themself.
I want to thank those people who have rushed in to give me compensating positive rep for this thread. Thank You.
Just forget about it, bud, he sure won't identify himself, and you just shouldn't take rep so seriously, who cares what some total stranger thinks about you? You can't get everybody to agree with you, so just ignore it, its not worth it
She is 100% right when it comes to reciprical linking, you shouldn't force your clients to create link pages and all that. Sometimes you can work out deals with other websites, which don't even revolve around your linking to them, but get you a link in return. You have to really be creative to do such a thing, but I have found that links aren't necessarily a "have to", they are a very easy way for some SEOs to make money... and when I say SEO, I use it lightly to talk about quite a few people that pretend to be SEO's... If you are a true SEO and you think that SEO is the main way to get traffic or growth, then you are not a real SEO at all... SEO should not be the cure all for a website, because generally it isn't... I can obtain loads more traffic to a site, without spending money, and without SEO... I think what needs to happen, is there needs to be some place where SEOs are rated, so that people can know who actually knows what the hell they are talking about and who doesn't... because there are quite a few people that don't have the damnedest idea and there are quite a few that are quite brilliant...
Well you obviously count yourself among the brillant. Can you give us some insight into how you can "obtain loads more traffic" without having your site well placed in the SERPs. Because if a site places well in the SERPs I would argue that by definition it is Search Engine Optimized.
Yeah, I'm, sure you'll leave many SEOs without work if you can explain your magical way of getting loads of traffic to a site without "spending money and without SEO"
Now lets take this arguement that Jill and Shawn are making that there is no need to enter into any reciprocal linking relationships in order to acquire backlinks. I agree this is true for individual sites that offer a lot of valuable free information or services. And of course DigitalPoint is an excellent example of this type of site. But I feel that both Shawn and Jill are being disingenuous when they make this kind of argument. The vast majority of sites that use reciprocal links are commercial sites selling the same products as many many other sites. As much as they may try to have superior service, information and pricing they still are not going to attract the number of backlinks needed to compete in the SERPs. Take Vicious Summer's Lingerie site as an example. Is anyone really suggesting that she could attract the 100s or even 1000s of links that a competitive site like hers needs to rank highly in the SERPs without offering to swap links or place reciprocal links back from her site?
But Shawn I would argue that that isn't what you said or at least the impression your previous message gave. Jill has been spouting this ridiculous position for years -- yes I agree it works for some site -- but it won't work for many many others. But Jill takes a holly than thou attitude to it and seems to suggest that any body who would stoop to reciprocal linking is some kind of spam artist and charlatan. The fact of the matter is that for the vast majority of commercial web sites aggressive linking campaigns that include reciprocal linking are necessary for successful SERP placement. So by all means tell us about your success at attracting links, but don't suggest that everyone can succeed without offering reciprocal links. It just isn't true.
I'm not saying there is anything wrong with reciprocal links. I was just pointing out that I agree with her when she says you don't always HAVE to do reciprocal links to be successful. Her taking a "holier than thou" approach to anything is nothing I care about to be honest. I don't know (nor do I care) if she does or doesn't. I don't read her writings (for the most part, I don't read anyone's articles). Anyone that takes anything they read (about ANYTHING) as the word of god would be foolish IMO. As far as my success with attracting links, I don't have any because I don't try to attract links (not because I don't want them, simply because I'm too lazy to spend any time on it).
Nobody is going to argue with that, but Jill is not saying "you don't always HAVE to". She is saying "you never should HAVE to". That's ridiculous and wrong and she is misleading and misinforming people by suggesting it is universally true. That not true either Shawn. I've read you quite proudly talk about all the links your site has attracted on several occasions. You have written and offer a number of very valuable free tools, but obviously these are part of a marketing strategy to draw traffic to your web site so that you can sell some of your not for free products and services. A spillover of that strategy is that people will put up links to your site. So while you may not have intentionally pursued backlinks your strategy certainly has attracted them. If you have such a disdain for backlink why would you have established the coop network? Some of your sites are among the prime beneficiarys of this link network.
Well, I read it differently I think. I took it as "you never HAVE to do anything", which I agree with. I think you have to do SOMETHING, but there isn't one thing (reciprocal links in this case) you ALWAYS have to do. I'm more amazed/baffled how I get links than I am proud. None of my tools were written with the goal of attracting links though (although it was a extra benefit). To be honest, all the tools I've written come back to the underlying reason of be being lazy (they were written to make my own personal life easier). Me letting other people use them is an afterthought (the keyword tracker for example had to be retrofit with user accounts after I thought, "I wonder if anyone else would kind this useful?"). I don't have a disdain for back links. But for me (personally), I don't really have anything to gain by acquiring them either. For example, I would never pay for links simply because I have nothing to gain monetarily by doing so (obviously that's not good business sense for me). The links I gain from the ad network also are not the primary reason I run the ad network (believe me). In fact, I've artificially lowered my weight because others in the ad network would benefit from that weight far more than I would. I would still gladly run the ad network if not a single one of my ads were ever displayed.
All I know is that I don't like reading articles unless the writer is someone who really inspires me. People seem to put too much emphasis on certain "seo experts". There is no such thing as an seo expert IMO. What matters is the search engines, which direction they are headed in. What Jill is saying is said by many others in different ways. If people want to exchange links, let them. But there are many other ways to do so. Obviously when she writes something, it gets publicity, good or bad, it's all publicity.
Exactly what I thought. What irritated me in the first place about that article is: When you write about sites that don't need reciprocal linking, you also need to portray what sites need reciprocal linking and a majority of the sites do need reciprocal linking. Any novice website owner would be convinced, after reading that article, that he did stay away from SEO firms that talk about the advantages of reciprocal linking. By the way what makes a website cool? Content, Design, Readability, Free Tools (if possible) etc etc... Gleefully, I'm now starting to see the entry of hybrid professionals: Those who can design, program, and SEOptimize websites. Mark my word! These people will bring about the end of people who only do SEO copywriting on existing content, insert a Heading tag here and there in an existing design and get away with it saying that content optimization has been done. Usability, Accessibility, Design, Readability all come into play when it comes to one-way linking, especially design and readability because they impress easily. Forget tools, Jill's can't even do web design. Regards, Dilip Samuel