Suck it up Whiny Webmasters

Part of my role as a freelance writer is to stay atop the trends, specifically within the realm of optimization, marketing and website development. Because of this I am constantly seeing website owners griping about Google’s stance against paid linking strategies.

I mentioned it in an earlier post about Google and paid links how I endorse their stance on the issue. While I completely think that there’ll be collateral damage & some websites will get slapped with a penalty of sorts, even if they’re not partaking of the illicit trade of blackmarket linking strategies, C’est la vie. Search engine marketing is a game, and sometimes there are curve balls thrown at us and we have to learn to take the good pitches with the bad.

Anyway, while weeding through the comments sections of prominent news stories covering this heated debate I am seeing quite a few website owners with misguided disgruntlement. At the end of the day, there’s no debate: it’s Google’s search engine, it’s their index, it’s their results being displayed; regardless of how it affects us as website owners, Google can do whatever in the heck they want.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, it’s our right as website owners to gripe, and we might even have some standing for a noteworthy argument if we had absolutely any stake in Google, like being a majority shareholder for instance. But… we don’t. We’re simply website owners who depend on the search engine giant because they hold the biggest share (nearly 60%) of internet search users, in the USA at least.

In my opinion, there are way too many people thinking that Google is telling them how to run their websites, how to conduct their business and what they can and can’t do with their own internet property. As far as I’ve seen, that can’t be further from the truth.

Google isn’t playing dictator and telling website owners that they have to do or change anything; they’re merely pointing out the fact that if website owners do certain things, they should expect other certain things to happen. That’s it.

I won’t go into naming names of specific comments because it’s not my intention to burn anyone, but this relentless whining and griping by website owners severely misplaced.

Some specific comments that stood out to me:

My niche market relies on paid links for exposure!

Niche markets, by definition, are small & tightly focused. What this should, in most cases, translate into is less keyword competition in the SERPs. Certainly obscure niche markets won’t benefit very much from the viral effects of article marketing, but paid linking strategies aren’t the only answer in these small & tightly focused markets. Use a bit of creativity and you can still work on beneficial link building without resorting to using links that have been, or will be, devalued later on.

I’ve been selling links and now my business is ruined!

You’re selling a “product” (rankings, Page Rank enhancing benefit) that you had no real control of anyway, you should have been expecting the floor to fall out underneath you at some point. When you’re a middleman in a volatile & unpredictable market without any control over the product itself. . . that’s a recipe for disaster.

I have excellent content but nobody will link to me because my niche is too small!

This kind of ties into the above “niche” point, but nonetheless…. If you are targeting a niche where nobody will link to you because your niche is too “small”, maybe you might want to expand your market. However, it shouldn’t be too hard to rank for “All Natural Grape and Cranberry Flavored Dog Biscuits” even without a significant amount of inbound links.

Google is being hypocritical, they sell links through Adsense!

This is among the more ignorant of statements I’ve seen thus far. What should be abundantly clear at this point is that Google is taking action against websites that sell links that have the ability to manipulate their index, not links that are somehow obfuscated by JavaScript or that have the rel=nofollow tag attached to them.

I have worked on linking strategies for a number of different keyword markets (or “niches”), and truth be told, some keyword markets are harder than others to obtain relevant links for; viral link building methods or not. You can obtain quality & relevant inbound links to your website, regardless of the market, if you just use a bit of imagination and creativity. If you lack imagination and creativity, hire somebody who has it.

After all that I’ve said….

Will Google’s decision stop me from using incentivized linking strategies?

No way. While an already popular website doesn’t have any problem increasing their awareness through linking strategies such as “link baiting”, new websites aren’t going to climb up to the top of the SERPs on their own merit, especially in competitive keyword markets. You’ve got to get a bit creative to get the initial exposure for your website.

Lest you be confused, I’m not talking incentivized link building for unrelated websites. For instance, if I were to link to a pet supply store from this website, that would be seriously out of place. However, my two outbound links on this website (sidebar) are for my SEO Copy writing service and my resell rights website; both of which are likely to be of value to my website’s visitors.

Will Google’s decision stop me from selling link placement on my websites?

No way. However, to be fair, I wouldn’t put a link on my website where I thought it was topically irrelevant and didn’t provide value to the user. If there’s a topical relationship and it adds value to my website ( to the readership), I have no problems adding that link to my website for payment or otherwise.

For example, my above paragraphs speaks about two websites of my own that I link to here on this blog. If I had a search engine optimization firm or an internet marketing firm or a link building firm come up to me & ask for paid placement, I would probably say yes, though only after I checked out their website. The reason being? It provides value to my website & the people who visit it.

This post started out as a rant but ended up somewhere else… In any case – I welcome any thoughts, rebuttals or whatever you want to throw at me here.