“If I Had a Dollar Every Time I Hear That…”
We are following dozens of SEO blogs and we are on a number of email lists. The reason we do that is to keep up with the ever evolving world of SEO and update Kontent Machine accordingly.
One thing I often see is people getting paranoid whenever Matt Cutts or Rand Fishkin says something.
There is no better way to get yourself confused than reading Moz.com. Gold nuggets can be found there, for sure, but if you are following their blog you might be thinking about abandoning link building and throwing it all in “content marketing”.
Blackhat vs Whitehat SEO
Here is a funny thing: Once a SEnuke course provider asked us if Kontent Machine was blackhat and if he can use it with SEnuke. I wasn’t sure how to answer that question.
How exactly does Google know if somebody shared my content because he likes it or because I put a gun to his head? Where is the line between “earned” backlinks and “built” backlinks.
They say “blackhat is any attempt to manipulate the search engine rankings.” Well, if you are doing “content marketing” with the idea of having people share your content so you can get backlinks… isn’t that an attempt to manipulate the search engine results?
For me there are no such things as “blackhat” or “whitehat” but only strategies that work and those that don’t work. It all depends on what you want to achieve.
What amuses me the most is people saying that automated link building is dead. This cannot be further from the truth.
Recently our friend Matthew Woodward posted about a case study on his blog. Actually, the author is Charles Floate (the owner of GodOfSEO.co). What Charles did was to rank this page from his blog for “Rand Fishkin” and other related keywords by secretly building links.
Read the full case study here: Ranking for Rand Fishkin
It is more than interesting and proves not only that link building does work when used intelligently but that you can get pretty decent results in no time.
“You will get penalized… I guess.”
The question is “Will it work in the long term?” and the short answer “Who knows?”
If anybody tells me “This will soon get penalized” or “This will not work in the future.” he is obviously seeing the future or coming from it. If that is the case I have other questions for him.
It is all about testing and seeing what works and what doesn’t at this point in time, not what worked in the past and certainly not what “should” be working years from now.
Next week I will show you another awesome case study about a link building strategy which “shouldn’t” work again.
P.S. What we think about the whole “whitehat vs blackhat” thing is beautifully summed up here under “(THIS EMAIL WAS NEVER SENT TO RAND IN THE END, BUT MAYBE HE’LL SEE IT)” We couldn’t have said it better.