**by Eric Ward**
I recently read Is Most Of SEO Just A Boondoggle?
<http://searchengineland.com/most-of-seo-is-just-a-boondoggle-22297>
and the subsequent comments and attacks on the author Jill Whalen,
and it's become my own tipping point. Enough is enough. Every word of
that column was right on the money. It's just rare (and welcomed) for
a well known expert to state in a high profile venue like SEL what
many of us privately know to be true.
Those of us who have been doing what we do the longest are faced with
a choice every time we write about our own industry. Do we ignore the
elephant(s) in the room, or bring attention to not only the elephants,
but the huge dumps they leave on the carpet?
Through years of experience, success and failure, trial and error,
some of us in the SEM industry know exactly when a tool, tactic, or
piece of advice is total bullshit. Yet after all these years, we still
have companies making a nice living selling tools, tactics, or advice
which is just that: total BS. Why? Mostly because those of us who know
how to spot the BS have simply ignored it and quietly gone about our
own business. No need to make waves. Jill made waves. And I
congratulate her for it, and I'm going to try and do some wave making
myself, here in my neck of the woods, the neck known as link building.
Link building has so many boondoggle services it's ridiculous. I
couldn't cover them all in a single column here if I had to. I could
mention a couple, like press release distribution for link building
(pointless), or so-called top tier directories, (which I can count on
one hand and none o them really matter either). Sorry Yahoo, you kinda
sorta matter, but I've got client sites ranked 1st at Google that
aren't listed in Yahoo period.
Any readers who don't believe me, put up $1,000, and I'll pay you
$5,000 if I can't show you at least one site I helped build links for
that now ranks #1 for its key phrase, and that same site is not listed
in either Yahoo or DMOZ for that matter. Take the bet. I'm giving you
five-to-one odds, and my kid will need braces soon.
Even these brief comments will have repercussions. I expect attacks.
If you operate a directory not named Yahoo! and make money from it, of
course it will piss you off if I tell the truth about it being
useless. If you sell link building services based on press releases,
same deal. You don't want your clients reading this and asking you
hard questions. That's another reason most of us have kept quiet.
Outing a useless service or tool (and believe me link building tools
are a boondoggle bonanza) means the person who created the tool could
lose their livelihood. Nobody should have that happen, right?
But times change. I have a different agenda now, and motivations that
compel me. I wont take up space here every week or two just to go on
an attack, but remember Link Moses <http://www.ericward.com/articles/>
? I am him, and he's back for a limited engagement over at Link
Building Best Practices <http://www.ericward.com/bestpractices/>
. See LinkMoses Resurrected - Thirty Link Building Rants and
Commandments
<http://www.ericward.com/bestpractices/2009/07/linkmoses-resurrected-thirty-link.html>
.
Back to Is Most Of SEO Just A Boondoggle?
<http://searchengineland.com/most-of-seo-is-just-a-boondoggle-22297>
Among the tactics questioned were PageRank sculpting, Meta tags,
sitemaps, H1 tags, keyword rich URLs, and URL submission to engines.
On the link building side, boondoggles include anchor text, press
releases, directories, articles, paid links, and link bait. And I'm
just getting started&
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the author, and not
necessarily Search Engine Land.
Eric Ward <http://searchengineland.com/author/eric-ward/>
has been in the link building and content publicity game since 1994,
providing services ranking from linking strategy
<http://www.ericward.com/linkstrategy.html>
to a monthly private newsletters on linking for subscribers.
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