Link Development - good, bad and ugly. Part 1.

Thinking of SEO in retrospective, how it was a few years ago it's funny thing to do. Well, at that time I seriously believed that paid inclusion in Yahoo Directory, Dmoz, submission to directories will always be around BUT...


Yahoo has officially stated that they gonna close their paid inclusion program till the end of this year and, quite frankly, it is about time. Knowing that having your site included in Yahoo dir does not influence neither your site ranking on Google nor your traffic as it used to be would you invest $299 / year? I wouldn't.


Dmoz. Phew...what can I say?! The idea was great but its implementation faced with a human factor. I'm not telling that it's completely corrupted but when you have a suspicious that your site hasn't been included after 6+ Universe knows how many months is because the editor has its own interest is quite often way more than just a suspicion. It happens and A LOT.


Directories. What directories? Dmoz - see the previous paragraph. Local vertical directories may help but they aren't free and they won't help your ranking on Google as you may expect. 


When I think about running Link Development campaign I think about what authority resources I can find for a particular site. We know that the Internet is huge but in reality it has divided on certain types of sites - social sites, blogs, vertical directories, review sites, product sites, personal pages, portals. But there are lots of sites for which it seems like it's impossible to find such authority sites to get a link from.


Of course if there is a white hat in SEO there should be a black one too. Right - buying links from resources with either big traffic or lots of pages in Google Index or high PageRank. The matter fact it's a tricky question - if this technique belongs to black or white hat. Of course Google against this practice and I completely agree with its point of view on it. But....there is always 'but', many online projects either don't have time to grow its traffic naturally or desperately have to bring profit in a short term or struggle financially and their owners go into all methods of a traffic increasing they can think of and all ethic, moral criteria go out of the window.


There is sad, rarely spoken loudly true - Google simply can't make happy all site owners by giving them high ranking in their Search Results, there is always a competition and we don't know for sure if the best products / services, so to speak, go up in Search Results. There is no a simple correlation between a service or product quality and its ranking on Google. Obviously pointing links do not work, this criteria has been abused So Many Times. And I can't see any new way on a horizon, which people who want to win the race for Google Top 10/20 will not abuse. Period. 


Microsoft people talk about understanding people's intent on Web 2.0 Summit as a way to provide the most relevant search results possible, but lots of people can't themselves understand their own intent :-) To be continue....