Secrets to Links & Google Rankings

Nothing can be more frustrating for an ethical agency to have to sit beside someone who is completely the opposite side of the SEO world and sadly in Asia at the 2008 Search Marketing Expo I had to deal with this situation. Asia is a developing market in terms of experience in the world of the Internet, especially SEO and a lot of the agencies have focused on the wrong things.

I spoke on a few tracks at SMX but this time I was on the track along with Allen Qu from NetConcepts. He went first and spent 20 minutes explain that the only way to rank for anything in Google is to buy links, he then went on to offering links for sale and explaining that this is what their “SEO” company does for its clients.

Now yes link buying is a no no in Google’s eyes and while many agencies practice this method, what drove me crazy is in the talk he only focused on that you had to buy links, not that links come naturally from creating a great site. What was very funny for me is he even said while some clients get banned in Google he still recommends focusing on buying links as the his agencies SEO service.

Ok so you can guess by now my presentation was not talking about buying links. My presentation PPT version is also included here and I focused on what really makes a difference. Sorry that is in Chinese but the focus on the presentation was on that internal links are what 99% of the websites on the internet need to focus on and where most people get it completely wrong.

I have seen companies who happy to buy links and “fairy dust” for $1,000’s but then on their own website they fail to update the navigation/linking. Websites all too often focus on the external links, but if you analysis the algorithm at Google you will see that the internal linking is what receives the most weight in terms of keyword target/ranking. The most basic way to think about this is while other sites might link to you saying A if you say your B then who is Google to believe? If Google believed what others said about you more then what you said about yourself you could easily simply change any websites ranking by pointing unrelated links at its content.

If I can find the originally English presentation I will post it, but if that doesn’t work for a rare occasion the English speaking SEO world is the one that is at a disadvantage in terms of understanding what true SEO is all about.