Buying links for SEO lift & the risks of penalties w/ Jason Calacanis asking questions
Hey Folks - At the last Affiliate Summit I had the pleasure of having a web business heavyweight in on my session. For those of you that know Jason Calacanis, he is a baller in the web business space and is famous for the SEO is BS comment that set the SEO Industry ablaze. If you are interested in finding out more, here’s a link (to google results).
As you all know SEO is something I just love being a part of and in this presentation, I gave my honest gut feedback on how to do linking the right way, and how to prime the pump if you have to with paid links…lets be honest a submission to Yahoo Directory or Best of the web is a paid listing too. I don’t mean blatant spam sites, I mean just paying for links in general. Jason took it as an opportunity to ask some questions, I wish they were more substantive cause the audience would have gotten more value out some more substantive questions, but here’s the video on my thoughts about how to manage paid links, evaluate your competitors use of them, and see if you even need to. To watch the video with my annotations in it go here instead of watching it below, when you embed it does not include annotations.
I also need your feedback, I spent some time annotating these videos because I talk fast and through out a lot of URLs, if you’d like me to go back and annotate more videos, please comment on our youtube channel or here on our blog - and I’ll start adding annotation of URLs and free SEO tools in the ones that get the most requests.
Thanks for reading and thanks to Jason for at least sitting down and asking some questions - it helped me actually be better prepared for future shows. Jason and I spoke after the show and assuming he was genuine about it - he was a totally cool dude who I think is sick of spammers, but then again aren’t we all!
really solid, no matter what calacanis thought.
Comment by jules
June 13th, 2008 @ 3:17 pm
Wil, you make a great point. If you would have walked onto stage and did 40 minutes telling people to “make good content”, 90% of the audience would have been pissed.
People want reality. And while “making good content” is correct, there’s more, and that’s what you’re good at explaining. Nice work.
Comment by Jim Kukral
June 13th, 2008 @ 3:24 pm
@jim kukral - thanks - that is where I think Jason could really help people (dare I say that) - he’ll say writing great content is 90% of the battle and he’s right, but how does he get his insporation? could he share with us what process he uses to write the great content he does? That would be most helpful!
Comment by wil
June 13th, 2008 @ 3:36 pm
Nicely done Wil. The other point to note in the whole “write good content” approach is that good content can’t have an SEO impact unless there’s an initial readership that will link it out. Until that great content reaches the eyes of someone who will run with it, it has nearly no SEO benefit. For larger companies, not a huge deal - they likely have traffic to their sites that would pick up strong content.
The context of the speaking engagement is important here though - you were speaking at Affiliate Summit. That playing field isn’t even, and some of the folks who don’t have a strong online network to lean on might have to rely on paid links to gain some initial momentum. I think you were spot on in how you approached the issue.
Comment by Eppie Vojt
June 14th, 2008 @ 11:23 pm
@jules thanks
@eppie - thanks buddy, you know me, just trying to give my honest .02! If you want to see a real example of where content is not enough go here:
http://www.thinkseer.com/blog/why-content-is-not-always-king-so-stop-preaching-it/2008/03/24/
Comment by wil
June 16th, 2008 @ 12:26 pm
Great presentation Wil! But it ended right in the middle of a very interesting sentence about buying directory links. Where you going to say that you first check to see if Google actually counts them as backlinks? I’d love to know.
Comment by Carolyn Price
July 1st, 2008 @ 1:00 pm
Carolyn - thanks for dropping a line - I’ll get the next part up on youtube shortly.
Comment by wil
July 3rd, 2008 @ 10:45 am
I had the privilege of sitting in on this session and I thought it was great! Pretty cool that you got to have Calacanis try to grill you as well.
As for buying links, I’m totally with you on it. Obviously you need great content - paid links just complement that and are harder to detect when the quality of the content is actually high.
Looking forward to ASE!
Comment by Gyutae Park
July 27th, 2008 @ 11:27 pm
Hey Gyutae!
Most definitely we will have some fun at ASE. I think having Calacanis drill me was a blessing…I learned that I can handle my own on tough questions and not be a deer in headlights.
Ohh dude you are SOOOO right, paid links are way more difficult to find when you consistently have great content & legit links to compliment it.
Comment by wil
July 28th, 2008 @ 10:20 am