Brandon Laughridge’s Blog





If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the Link Building Secrets Revealed guide compiled by Pole Position Marketing. The idea of creating a link building guide is nice in principle (although may be just a bit worn out). I was kind of excited to open the .pdf and read what juicy secrets the SElebrities had to offer. I have to say it’s not only a little disappointing, there’s some sketchy stuff in there! I’m not one to be afraid of “creative” marketing efforts, but come on! I’m scared if these are the secrets of our industry. Of course, nobody is going to reveal the good stuff so I guess they just settled on telling us their sketchy methods.

The guide has three pages devoted to deceiving sites to get links for a porn site! Ethics aside, does Pole Position really want to associate themselves, even casually, with NSFW content? Whatever, to each his own. It’s billed as a joke but it’s super black hat in my opinion. The SEO expert created a fictional professor at the University of Calcutta and gave him a profession and name relating to the porn site they were promoting. They deliberately made the site look like the university website and went about getting links for the “professor’s” personal page (which meanwhile linked to the porn sites they were promoting).

I just talked about building secondary sites the other day and I have no problem with creating resources and linking to my own content–but in this case it’s outright deception. The SEO talked about getting links from Wikipedia and various other authority sites using the fake professor as a front and from stealing content from a real prof. Hopefully this site really was an experiment, as offensive as it may be, and wasn’t really used to promote his pr0n sites.

The first section by Patrick Altoft also struck me as pretty shady. He suggests using cloaking to tailor your link profile to each individual search engine. Call me an idealist, but I don’t think there are too many links that can really hurt you in Google. I believe that you do have to tailor your links to different engines but I don’t think it’s something that has to be done like this. From my experience, if you want to rank high for “red widgets”, get some links from the first few pages of the SERPs from each search engine. Mix that with your normal methods and your chances of ranking are much higher.

Not all of the experts sucked. I especially enjoyed Hamlet Batista’s explanation of the influence of crawl rate and indexing on the value of a link.  That’s VERY valuable stuff and doesn’t get the face time that it really deserves.  Jim Boykin presented a novel conept–actually getting clicks from your “ads”!  Imagine that.  Finally, Eric Ward’s creative use of Google Alerts can get you thinking creatively on how to get fresh, topical links for your site.

I’d recommend checking out the guide because there’s definitely some good idea.  Be sure to remember that a method isn’t necessarily safe or smart just because an expert endorses it.

I don’t really have the readership to get a bunch of comments, but I’m curious, what kind of sites do you use to support your main sites?  Where I come from we call these sites “secondary sites.”  I’m a fan of creating blogs and buying old websites.  Do you care about actually adding value or just faking value to get links.

As a good internet citizen I suppose I should care about adding some value, but personally I don’t give a crap as long as my site’s not terribly overt link spam.  That attitude is changing for me though.  As the web continues to grow more and more competitive it’s important that these sites really do add value, not only to be “good” to everybody on the net but to be sure you stay above the radar for spam and can actually get links naturally.

Your thoughts?  Do you even build sites to support your main projects or do you think that’s spammy in and of itself?