Chasing Links: Google made me do it
The title will make sense soon, I promise.
What happens when the government makes a massive drugs haul, and busts the major suppliers?
- The good guys celebrate
- Supply dries up
- Users become prepared to pay more
- The price of the drug rockets
- There isn’t enough supply to satisfy demand
- To make their stock go further, the remaining suppliers cut the drug with a less expensive substance
- Price continues to rise
- Stocks are diluted and contaminated even further to dangerous levels
- Users get sick, some die
- The strain increases on the healthcare and support systems
- Supplier gangs fight to retain enough market share, increasing violent crime
- The strain increases on the police system
- Society breaks down, aliens invade the world, Matt Cutts answers a video question with a definitive answer, and the world as we know it explodes in an awesome ball of white light.
If any government still existed after this, they’d wonder what the frak just happened. Their idea was so good on paper and in their controlled test models. How could such a well intended initiative end cause such chaos?
To brush over the fact I’ve stolen an episode of Numb3rs as very tenuous analogy for this post, I’ll tie it into search engine marketing…
What started out as a great idea by Google, establishing website authority and relevance with inbound links, has produced results far down the line they just couldn’t predict or control. Effects that no normal person could predict.
Buyers, sellers, services and companies have all been born from this, where otherwise they simply wouldn’t exist. By indirectly placing commercial value on the link, Google have indirectly forced the world to define a scale of acceptable ethics that threatens to affect perceptions of morals and even law.
Yes, there are people out there who think that buying links is unethical, immoral, and even illegal, and it might not be so far fetched that the law could change in the future to agree with the society on this point.
The truth is, I don’t want to chase links as part of my job.
Linkbuilding has to be the most soul-sucking part of SEO. I love writing content and putting together the most kick ass resource available for searching customers, so full of value and reassurance that they don’t need to go anywhere else.
But this simply isn’t enough in a competitive market where the majority of search engine success comes from off-page optimisation.
As much as I deplore the the link culture, it’s here to stay until another underpinning factor replaces it.
Google must know they created this sucky link-chasing culture. They must be aware that they are cleaning up their own mess. But they must also be aware that most business is built on the back of opportunity, and they basically created a huge opportunity by placing commercial value on the hyperlink.
Agree? Disagree? Just wanna say hello? Let me know at http://twitter.com/lindop
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