I’ve just finished reading an article from Yoast, one of the best WordPress SEO experts out there. This blog is using their awesome plugin WordPress SEO By Yoast. In this article he is talking about ethics of SEO. While I can agree to an extent that black hat SEO is hurting our industry in general, I can add that this is competitive world and to each his own. He kinda used the very same words describing this. While I am not running away from breaking the Laws of Google, I am one of those people who will strive not to break the law of the land.
I had clients and employers who demanded from me to follow black hat guidelines. And I obeyed. It’s not particularly hard when your bread depends on it. If you are living in developed country, you have no idea how it looks like to have 300 $ monthly salary as your country average. I am not talking on my behalf, I am talking on behalf of the majority of people of Serbia. If you tell someone from my country that pushing a few buttons will bring bread crumbs to their table, they won’t see the ethical side of it.
Do I feel bad about doing what I’ve been handed over as work, hell no. Do I support it, well no. And there is much more to it than the part of the “Ethics”. Because if we start this topic of Ethics, this article won’t be finished until tomorrow, and I don’t have that much time. But I do have time to tell people that not only it’s bad doing black hat SEO, it’s also short term view. A lot of things that I advised my clients not to do, turned out to be correct in really short time span. While you are spending your resources chasing the position, your true competitors are doing something you aren’t. PRODUCING HIGH QUALITY CONTENT AND CREATING RELATIONSHIP.
SEO is dying, let’s face it. It is like that since I got involved with internet marketing. Since Facebook introduced Open Graph, I knew that the future of search is going to change too. And today it’s happening. We are moving from link economy, to authorship economy, where only way of going up is nurturing your online connections. There is certainly going to be a transitional period, which is going to last for at least a couple of years, but if you want to be at the top of the web food chain, and have a lots of eyeballs pointed to you and your product, you need to act differently. You need to feel the next wave of the web heartbeat. Internet is alive, change is ingrained in it’s nature.
One moment it’s Pinterest, next moment it’s Google +, God knows what’s next. But you have to predict, you need to differentiate the fed from the trend. I am succesfully building my online career by predicting the right trends in the right time. And differentiating the fed from the trend. Hint: Pintertest is a fad.
So back to “unethical” link building. Only kind of link building you should get involved in, is the link building that can bring you referral traffic. If a link you just posted can pull traffic, than it’s good link building. If it’s pure straight out spam, without value adding on websites that don’t have any kind of traffic, than it’s outright spam and scheming of the Google system. Internet marketing is not a game of numbers, it’s much more deeper than that. Not all back links are created equal.
Look, the biggest reason why I will never endorse pursuing the creation of backlinks in general, is the fact that you are dispersing money from actual creation of content. Content is what enriches the web. High quality content is easier to produce, than the cost of the backlinks and spam software tools used to dominate the search engines. Just imagine how much wasted energy we have! How much good stuff could have been made instead. Now if you are going to base your company advantage on cheating, than you don’t really have any competitive advantage over your competitors once Google finds a loophole and blocks it, right?
Short term thinking won’t even bring you short term results. Only success that  you can achieve online comes through diversification. People need to wake up and realize that Google is not the only source of traffic (although it still brings me the most traffic across all of my websites, because it rewards my content creation). And main reason why Back Linking is a Complete Waste of time is because it’s like building a castle sand tower, that sooner or later, the big G will come and destroy your hard work, in the matter of seconds. And that hurts. Rightfully so.
Focus on things that matter. Build high quality relationships, build high quality content, write awesome software. And you won’t need SEO. All of that will be taken care of, while you build your little corner of the internet, called your website. You won’t regret it. I promise.