>>Why are they beating that horse to death?

I imagine because people are interested in finding out what works, and what doesnt. I think a lot of people are starting to realize that “inbound links” (as they’ve been done in the past few years) arent the be-all-end-all of ‘SEO’ anymore… or at least won’t be for long.

And honestly, I’m glad. Link building can be a tedious task with very little ROI (return on investment). There’s just nothing enjoyable about it, in my opinion. But social networking… now that’s a different story

That’s not to say that good quality links shouldnt be sought after – because they should. But all of this link submission, link requests, links pages, submitting to directories by the hundreds, etc – it’s just not adding value to the web for the most part. Some directories, yes – hundreds or thousands, no.

I’m thinking I’ve rambled enough in this comment… perhaps I’ll expand on this a bit in a new post this week

Best,
Lynn

Fantastic post, though.

I e-mailed this part to myself for future reference:

“If you want to establish a long term income-generating eBusiness, then it’s important to make your site(s) unique – to be creative, and to offer something of value on the web. If you put your thought into it from that end, you’ll get much better results. Building sites just to make money is the “method” that gets people “delisted” more often than not.

If you are doing business online, then you are obviously a surfer and a searcher yourself. So put your own ads/sites to the test and surf your way over to them. Psyche yourself out, get in the mode, and pretend you are your own ideal visitor. Is your website helpful, useful… easy to navigate? Do you find what you’re looking for – easily?

At PubCon last week, Matt Cutts made this simple statement during the Google lunch: “The idea is to get a good, clean web with relevant results”.”

Thanks Lynn. You rock as always.

Robert

It’s a difficult balance that search engines have to play. Google may sandbox a lot of newer sites to avoid spam, but this can also hurt their results by not revealing newer, GOOD content that comes. MSN seems to update the quickest and thus able to mine content a lot better (both good and spam). Yahoo’s dive into social tag searching will offer yet another set of results to this mix.

I too have been looking over my sites over the last few days. I’ve been stripping away some of the more commercial material and adding things like quotes, know how’s and that sort of thing. Although I still want to make money from the sites, I sure feel a lot better about myself at the end of the day, knowing that I am providing something useful to someone, other than providing something useful to someone just to earn a dollar. Great work Lynn-a real eye opener:)

You make some great additional points. More and more I am seeing the internet as ‘my web’… and I find myself getting more particular about what I expect, which has had a big impact on what I want to ‘put out there’.

It will be interesting to see how things change across the web over the next few years. I predict things will change dramatically…

-Lynn

once you shift your paradigm to see your development efforts in this way, the rest of your job gets easier. additionally, if you are creating content of value, you will be able to rest easier at night, knowing that you are less prone to a delisting, or other catastrophic algorithm tweek designed to combat spammers.

and to strengthen matt’s argument, once you have created a site with value to the user, then your site becomes as valuable to the engines as they are to you. they need your good content site to help with their relevancy, and they will be happy to list you accordingly.