So what are links? What is link building and why are they? Are they important? How do you get them in a way that's going to be sustainable and it's going to work for you? And how do you get them in a way that's likely to kill your business? The beauty of the web is the fact that you can link to other stuff really easy.
That's why it's called Measure It. It's lots of things connecting to other things. It often takes a very long time for a piece of content to, to be out there and then be linked and then other people to find it and go, yeah, I want to link to it as well. It's not certainly not an overnight thing.
The system is supposed to mimic the way that the scientific community cites research, for example. And when you kind of move away from that and you start gaming the system, you start swapping links, you start buying and trading them, the whole thing falls apart.
Paying for links is effectively trying to game the search engine results. And Google basically says, if you're buying links and you're buying them in order to improve how your website ranks, then you're in breach of their terms and conditions. And if they find you doing it, they might impose some sort of penalty. So, um, in this podcast, we're going to talk about, uh, vex, a vexing, vexed subject, I don't know which. What's the right word? I'm not sure.
Controversial.
Controversial. It is a bit controversial. Yeah. We're going to talk about link building. Um and I'm actually going to start this off and the guys don't know I'm doing this, but I've got this. I've got a book in front of me, which is the, um, proceedings of the seventh International World Wide Web Conference in Brisbane, which happened in nineteen.
This is going.
nineteen ninety eight. Right. Okay. So at that conference, um, somebody called Dave Robinson. Yes. Me, um, was presenting a paper that he'd co-authored that I'd co-authored. Uh, I was talking about myself in the third person. And that's horrible. It is. Yes. Anyway, old Facebook, um, called delivering computer assisted learning across the world Wide Web. Um, I really enjoyed it. I got, you know, the uni paid for me to go over to Brisbane and turned it into a big trip, and it was fantastic. Um, but at that conference, because that's not interesting for what we're talking about at that conference, there was a couple of guys, um, namely Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, um, who were there talking about the anatomy of a large scale hypertextual web search engine and the proceedings. The paper that they presented is available online. Um, but one of the interesting bits of that was, um, in their paper in the second section in system features, they talked about PageRank bringing order to the web. And they talk about, uh, the citation brackets link graph of the web and suggest that it's an important resource that at that point in time had been largely unused in existing web search engines. So in a nutshell, what they figured out was by creating a map containing, at that time, five hundred and eighteen million links was. It gave them an insight into what was important and what maybe wasn't important in terms of web pages at this point.
Perhaps we need to clarify that those are the guys that actually invented Google, in case people don't know.
I think people know Sergey Brin necessarily. Maybe not, maybe not. I mean, I mean, since that conference, obviously I've thrived. I've never really heard. What did they get up to?
No idea. No idea. You don't hear much about these these Google people anymore?
No that's right. Exactly that. But, um, yeah. So, you know, what they figured out was there's a lot of web pages and there's obviously massive, massively, massively more. It's Friday, there are a lot more web pages now than there were then.
Uh, yes, more than five hundred million or whatever.
Even then, it was difficult when you looked at all the web pages that were available, it was really hard to figure out which were the good ones and which were the bad ones. And what Sergey and Larry did was figure out that if we look at which web page is linked to other web pages, then and and explore that and investigate that, we can quite easily figure out that web pages that lots of other pages link to are likely to be more important than web pages that nobody links to. Now, clearly there's a flaw in that because somebody could write something brilliant, well researched, and brilliant that nobody else knows about, and put it up on the web. And it wouldn't appear anywhere, because it doesn't have this trust signal of lots of other pages linking to it. But the reality is that over time that would be addressed because people would find it, they would share it, they would link to it. So the background to this chat, and I know it's a bit geeky for us, but the background for this chat is like, you know why? What is link building? Why is what are links actually not link building? So what are links? What is link building and why are they? Are they important? How do you get them? Uh, how do you get them in a way that's going to be sustainable and it's going to work for you. And how do you get them in a way that's likely to kill your business? So I'll stop talking. I'll let Julie and Alex have a little chat about what I've just said.
Where do we start? Um, I think where to start is, you know, we get people ringing us up, emailing us, you know, getting in contact all the time saying, you know, do you do link building? We need to do link building. We've got a website, we need it to rank better in Google. We need to do link building. And you know, our answer is, well, there's, there's link building and there's link building. Um, the, the type of link building that people often sort of get sucked into is the type where, you know, you pay a few hundred quid and somebody places links to your website on lots and lots of really dubious looking websites. Um, and they pay for them.
They're not always, we've unearthed, um, link profiles where somebody's working in a government organisation, like a council who has got access to the website. Realises there's a couple of quid to be made and will put content buried inside a council's website. So it's got a credible credibility because Google's giving that that whole website credibility because it's a government website with lots of pages, etc., and they kind of bury them inside. And, you know, we've.
Seen remember that I remember that it is it okay? It's not a dubious website, but it's definitely a dubious practice. It really is, you know, putting someone else's content on a local council website on a page that's maybe slightly relevant to the topic, but, um, totally shouldn't be happening. Um, so yeah, either dubious websites or dubious ways of getting your content onto websites where it really shouldn't be. Um, and that's quite common and it's quite common to pay to put links on, you know, fairly high profile websites that just charge for, you know, putting articles on and adding links.
Okay. So you mentioned pay. Sorry. Alex. You. Julie, you just mentioned you can pay to get links. Alex, is that okay to do?
Well, it used to be. Which is the point I was about to make, is that, you know, these tactics that we're talking about where, you know, you pay somebody to put one hundred links to your website up on various blogs or, you know, like you say you contact somebody at a local council and you essentially bribe them to slip a link into their content. That kind of thing used to be fine, right? Also, the.
Difference between paying someone to put the links on and paying for the links. And you've got to be really careful because you can pay somebody like a PR company to put articles out there, but the articles aren't paid for in the magazine, and that's okay. But paying the magazine or the website to put your content on it is technically according to Google, not okay. So it's really quite complicated.
And there's a lot of gray area, I think.
Indeed.
So can I come in on that just briefly. I mean, we've mentioned Google, we've mentioned links, we've mentioned buying links. We we've we've probably everybody listening, I think, will understand what we mean by links now and why they're important because they show the search engine algorithms that your pages might be important because other people are linking to them, voting for them, giving them a, a thumbs up, if you like. The reason that the whole paying thing is a problem is paying. Paying for links is effectively trying to game the search engine results by. Instead of having links to your site based on merit, you're going and buying them. And Google is very specific about not buying links. It basically says if you're buying links and you're buying them in order to improve how your website ranks, then you're in breach of their terms and conditions. You're gaming the search engine, and if they find you doing it, they might, um, impose some sort of penalty. Now in twenty twenty one, are they still doing that or are they just deciding to ignore the links? I don't know, but if you want to play by Google's rules and some might be, some people might argue with with some credibility, like, well, why would you play by Google's rules? Google's just a business like anybody else. I mean, what is this Google rules thing? You know, are they the government or they're not? Um, but if you want to play by the rules and tick the boxes, then you shouldn't do that. So sorry if unless you've probably forgotten what you were going to say. I'll stop talking, Alex, and you can talk.
Well, no, only that, like I was saying, you know, um, in the old days, Google used to be very bad at telling whether or not you'd done that, you know, whether you'd gone and slipped somebody twenty quid, one hundred quid, whatever to get a link to your site. Nowadays, I think they are much better at picking up on those things. And so you do have to be a lot more careful. And I think link building as a kind of as a as a service, as a thing you can offer people has kind of changed massively over the years, hasn't it? It's not really something that's safe or I guess white hat is the kind of industry buzzword that, you know, you can do anymore.
Yeah. So there is there are agencies who specialise in what they commonly refer to as outreach. So they specialise in finding other businesses, other people, uh, maybe bloggers, magazine owners, that kind of thing who might have a need to link to your content. Um, and so there is a, an ethical, credible industry as well as the emails that we get probably thirty of every day saying, I own these five websites, which Google trusts and I will put your content on these, excuse me, on these websites for a fee. And we also get lots of emails to us saying, we'd love to put some content on your website. Our website's quite strong. It's got good authority and people want to post content in our blog, for example, with a link back to their website because and, and they're asking is like, how much money do you want to allow us to do that? You know, our answer is go away. Usually not. No, not usually. It's always go away. Sometimes it's less polite than that.
Yeah. Yeah.
That's because.
That used.
To be we will link to the sites that we decide are worthy of linking to. And that is how Google's supposed to work. You you see a site and you think that is really useful to the readers of my blog or my website. And so I will include a link because I think that adds, you know, some depth or some background information to the thing I'm writing about. And you do it because you respect that. And you, you think it's a really useful post or article or page to, to link to, not because somebody slipped you a tenner to do it.
Well, it all goes back to that thing that Dave was saying at the beginning, isn't it? Which is that essentially this system is supposed to mimic the way that the scientific community cites research, for example, whereby if you cite somebody's research paper, you're essentially giving it a vote of trust. You're saying, I've read this. I think it's relevant. I think it has important information in it. So I'm going to cite it in my paper. And when you kind of move away from that and you start gaming the system, you start swapping links, you start buying and trading them, the whole thing falls apart very quickly. You wouldn't trust a scientific research paper if you thought that the studies it was citing had paid to be there.
Exactly. And that's one of the things when you look at scientific papers, you look at, you know, which company has sponsored this paper and you get a little insight on, you know, where it's going. And you, you read it with a pinch of salt and you take bear that in mind. So you know, Google should be the same.
Well, can we go all the way back to Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the creation of the web in the first place? I mean, he is an academic. He worked at CERN in Switzerland, I believe, and he wanted an easy way to write scientific papers and easily reference other scientific papers. So if someone was reading his paper and he cited, you know, based on Doctor Smith's study, yada, yada, then he wanted to be a link to Doctor Smith's study. So you could just click on it and go and read Doctor Smith's study. I wish I hadn't picked Doctor Smith's study.
That's not find something easier to say.
Yeah. So he wanted. And that's where the whole hyper texting linking came from. That's where it came from in the first place. He created HTML. He created hypertext links in order to make it easy to share information and link to other information. And that's what Google picked up on this idea of, wait a minute. The beauty of the web is the fact that you can link to other stuff really easily.
It's called.
Measure It.
You know, it's lots of things connecting to other things. It's that's the web of information.
That's it's interesting what you said a minute ago, either Alex or Julie, you were talking about, you know, citing something and wanting to link to something that's credible. You know, you want to link to something that's credible. Um, but, you know, you read it first. I don't know if you've noticed, but if, if on Twitter, I think it is, if you go to retweet something, retweet an article or link to an article, it actually says, are you sure you want to retweet this because it doesn't look like you've actually read it. You know, because, because people, you know, people.
People.
Do. And they go, oh, that looks interesting. I'll retweet that. And then people will think I'm interesting because this looks interesting, even though I have no idea what it actually says because I haven't bothered to read it.
I do make a point of reading things before I retweet them, because you could retweet all sorts of rubbish and getting all sorts of trouble.
Agreed.
What we're, what we're kind of getting at, then, is the idea that realistically, the only kind of responsible, ethical way to link build is to only ever link to things that you've read and understand and that you care about, and to only really try and look for links to your content from people who have also read and engaged with it and like it.
Yeah. I mean, in a perfect world, you never go looking for links. You have fantastic, compelling content that people love and they link to. Yeah. And I know that and I get it. You know, I know that that's somewhat kind of, um, idealistic, but some of the best links that well know all of our links are to our website. All of our links are links that we have got because people have linked to us. You know, we created SEO Man, which was a comic book presents explanation of SEO, and loads of people have linked to it because they like it, including universities.
But and that's true. But I think that kind of underlines one of, I think, a lot of people's key frustrations with this whole idea of link building by kind of creating fantastic content that organically attracts links is that, you know, our website's been around for a long time, right? We've put out that content and we've got those links. So anybody new to the game, anybody that comes and starts an SEO agency tomorrow has a massive uphill battle to climb to try and attract those same links.
Yeah, it does take a very long time or it often takes a very long time for a piece of content to, to be out there and then be linked and then other people to find it and go, yeah, I want to link to it as well. It's not certainly not an overnight thing. Um, so that's why people do try and find ways of, of speeding it up.
Yeah, I agree. And, and, you know, I was saying it somewhat tongue in cheek because you can put fantastic content out there and it never gets linked to. So it never gets to credibility or anything else. But you know, the point I'm making is in Google's eyes, they would say, you know, create fantastic content. When people find it, they'll love it. But you could say, wait a minute, they won't find it because there's no links to it. So it's got no credibility, Mr. Google. Yeah. Well, we'll just kind of swiftly moving on when they find it and they really like it, they'll link to it. And that's what that's their ideal outcome because that helps them deliver the very best results.
Yeah. And that's what Google's Google's point is to provide you. When you go for a search, they want to provide you with the exact answer to the question you're asking.
Which they sometimes.
Do. Sometimes. Exactly. That's that's that makes Google the best search engine out there. So it's in their interest to make sure that they understand what the best answer to that specific question is. So they're always looking for these signals to, to prove to them which you know, which website to put at the top.
Yeah, yeah, one hundred percent. And one of the challenges we have is if a customer doesn't happen a lot, to be fair, but if a customer comes to us or a potential customer comes to us, maybe it's somebody we'd really like to work with. And they, they just want to do a sort of foot in the door type project. They don't want to do a lot of stuff, but they say, well, yeah, we kind of like what you guys are saying, but we'd like to try you out. And in order to try you out, we want you to do some link building for us because they have the wrong idea about what link building is. And nine times out of ten, I hate to say it, but nine times out of ten they've got nothing worth linking to. So they want you to link build to content that is rubbish or not worth linking to because it's just sales content might be great sales content, but who wants to link to a page which says we're really good buy shit from us? I mean, nobody wants to link to that. So, you know, it's very difficult to link, build and try and, and try and do anything with a request like that because you've got to start with having something. Um, that's link worthy and the only alternative, sorry, the only alternative is, which we wouldn't do is to go and buy links because if you buy links, they don't care what they're linking to, you know, give them a hundred bucks, you get ten links and they'll link to anything.
Yeah. So you've done a very quick link building project, but it's not actually going to help your website because the sites that are linking to you aren't credible. And at some point Google may figure it out and either ignore them or, you know, either or penalise them and, and make your site worse. But I think we'll probably come to that in a little while. Um, but what I was going to say, sorry, what I was going to say is, you know, if, if you want to do link building properly, you have to have decent content on your website that's actually going to inform and educate somebody who's looking for that information. In order to do that, you need to understand what people are needing to be educated on. In order to do that, you need to understand who the people are. So then it's suddenly not a quick project at all. It's a really long strategic engagement instead. And you know, that's probably what link building should be rather than a quick fix.
Yeah. Like I think it comes back to that whole idea of, of, you know, kind of what people are exposed to and what they know about something, right? So a lot of people think of link building as purely transactional because they're handed a spreadsheet full of links and told, we've built these links and it's like you say, link building is probably one of the hardest things to do in SEO. Really?
I think it is the hardest. Yeah.
The hardest. Yeah. Um, and it is strategic. You do have to kind of spend a lot of time and effort finding, you know, ways of doing it that are both intelligent and ethical. Um, but I think a lot of people, their only exposure to link building is when their SEO company hands them a spreadsheet with a hundred links on it and says, we built these links last month and it just kind of devalues the whole thing.
And we've seen, we've seen some of those spreadsheets and they can be quite scary. You know, you're a manufacturing company or an engineering firm, and you've got links on some sort of music website or, um, some like homeware website or something. And you just think, well, you know, that's not a great use of your marketing budget.
There's so much of the web, so, so many websites, web pages that have been created by the link building industry. These are zombie websites that nobody ever reads. And they are there purely for these link building claims.
Yeah, they're link farms aren't they?
Yeah. That's right. And and and what do they call them. Private blog networks. Pbns. So you build a blog, you get the blog ranking. It's got thousands of pages and then you start flogging, um, the opportunity for people to post their content on it. I mean, it was, was it the Penguin update that went into that or was it.
There were penguins and pandas? It was one of them.
Yeah, actually, I think it was the panda update that did it. Penguin was about thin content, i.e. lots of web pages with with, uh, next to nothing on them. Um, but the panda update. Navneet Panda, the engineer at Google. That update, I think was all about trying to find. I wish I, I should know which one's which, but hey, you know, does it really matter? Um, but there's certainly been, there's been exercises. Google has been very, very forthcoming in saying that they've provided this update where we've figured out and, and discovered some private blog networks, which some of which could be huge. So and, and, you know, there's plenty of stories out there. They're not even apocryphal. They're, they're real stories about businesses that went kaput because their link profile was, was, was killed overnight, their rankings disappeared overnight, their enquiries and sales disappeared overnight.
Yeah. They went from being sort of on the first page of Google and getting found by people who were looking for what they did, and then suddenly they're they're buried at the bottom or, you know, wiped out completely. And it, it massively affects, um, company's revenue, you know, it can kill them off completely. And that's because they've done something dodgy. And that's the thing you're saying about, you know, yeah, maybe Google will never find out. But at some point if Google does another update where it looks specifically for these things that you killed off.
Yeah, I think that's one of the things that I think a lot of people kind of outside the industry really aren't that aware of. You know, we talk about links as it in the way that, you know, kind of all links are equal, but they're not at all. And the problems with bad links are incredible, right? It can very quickly kind of tank your website's rankings. Um, it doesn't take much. Um, we've seen clients with, you know, very small amounts of bad links pointing to their site where it's obviously kind of hampering their ability to, to thrive in search. And I think that's something that maybe people should be more open about. Right. It's like building a few bad links is a very bad idea.
Yeah, it can, it can work for a little while, but as soon as you found out, then you know, all the work you've done on your website, all the good stuff you've done on your website is completely wiped out.
Yeah. And it's worth saying as well that some of these blog networks or some of these link networks are not necessarily, um, what you might call blackhat. They're not built purely for that purpose. And there are, I don't want to mention the name of them. Um, but it's a large newspaper group in the UK and they have lots of regional publications like, you know, the Sunderland Gazette and the, the Barrow in Furness times and stuff like that. And so they've got lots and lots of digital content, lots of digital properties, lots of different websites, different domains. Yeah. And they approached us and said, look, we've got this offering where we'll put your content and it's basically buried. You know, you would almost certainly never find it if you were, you know, just arriving at the website. So it's buried inside the website, a bit like the links that we were talking about that are on the council websites, that kind of thing.
They're not on a menu. You're not going to find them. If you go to the homepage, you're never going to be able to.
They are indexable. Google will find them. But basically you write some content, you write like five hundred words. You put in the links back to your website, to the pages on your website that you want to try and improve. And then they will post these things on either one, two, or three of their, of their regional web properties. And they are, they do have because they're like supporting official publications. They've got some credibility. Now. I don't know if they still do that, but certainly it was an offer that came our way and we had lots of conversations with them. And we were like, well, basically what that's unethical. And they were they'd seen it as an opportunity to make money because let's face it, the newspaper industry is desperately trying to figure out how to make money in an internet age. And this is a good few years ago now. But I mean, that's certainly one of the things that they offered. We we chose again, goody two shoes here. We chose not to do it because we just thought that just doesn't feel right. Um, and I'm not saying that businesses shouldn't do stuff like that because if it works and it helps your business prosper, then yeah, do it. Doesn't make the web a better place. And it's not big and it's not clever. But if it works, who's counting, you know?
But that also brings up the subject of duplicate content, which is another thing we get asked about all the time. So you're, you know, you're writing this article and they're putting it on four or five different websites. Actually, I think Google used to penalise you for duplicate content. It doesn't now. It just ignores all but one of them. So it's a kind of a waste of time.
It penalised you. I think the, I think the word.
There's a rumor that it was that.
It just ignores it. And that feels like a penalty.
Yeah. But it yeah, it doesn't penalise you for duplicate content. It, but it only it only picks one end result. Yeah.
The same.
But it doesn't penalise the original one. It just picks one and then everything else is like it never happened.
I'm intrigued by something Dave said there about it feeling wrong or off. This offer for a lot of people listening to this, obviously they're not going to know how to spot good or bad links, right? That's something I think you have to be kind of embroiled in SEO to know kind of at a glance whether or not this is a good link building idea or a bad one. Would you say that whether something kind of feels unethical, then, is the best barometer for knowing whether a link is is going to be bad for you?
You know, I'm not even saying that some of the stuff that's unethical is stuff you definitely shouldn't do, because, you know, it's a big, bad world out there. And if you're trying to grow a business, you're really going to care that much. We might care. The reason we might care is as an agency, if we went out getting those bad links, then there's a good chance at some point they might backfire. They might never backfire. But if they backfire again, guess who's in the firing line? We are. Yeah. Well, you got those links. Well, yeah, we did discuss it with you. We did say we can't make your website more credible. We can't find a way of getting links to your website. There's this unethical, nasty way of doing it. And you said, yeah, okay, do that then. I mean, I'm being ridiculous. You know, we would never have that conversation in the first place. But but as an agency, we've avoided the dodgy techniques. And basically because I'm a big baby and I don't want to get caught caught doing it and, you know, harm our client's business. I just haven't got the, the, the guts, if you like to do it. And there's a lot to do though. So I don't know if that answers your question.
Yeah. No it does.
We can sleep at night at least. You know, I think I think there's a, a line and you know, everyone has a line in a different place. But our line is, you know, there and we don't like to do stuff that that Google frowns on because it, it probably at some point might come back and bite us and our clients.
Yeah. Because there's also the whole realm of black hat link building, which we've talked about with the blog networks and things like that where you go out and buy links. But there's also like a, there's a network of people successfully hacking websites and then secretly putting content on those websites. I mean, we, we took a client on recently who basically killed off an entire website because it had been hacked and had something like 10,000 spammy pages, which they knew nothing about until they were searching their company name and getting results for various viagra related drugs and things, which were links to their website. And lo and behold, they had content on their website. So, you know, there's, there's, there's stuff that's actually illegal where people hack websites in order to place content and links in order to help another web page, another website somewhere else rank. And so there's that whole area as well. Um, it's getting harder probably to do that, but we've certainly, we certainly came across, uh, you know, quite recently an example of that.
Yeah.
Yeah. So you know what that really, what we're saying is links are important. And there are, you know, it's a minefield. Um, when it comes to actually trying to get them. But what are we thinking? What, what do, what do we want to talk about? When it comes down to giving people advice about how to get links that actually are of value. It's ethical. They're not going to come and bite you on the ass in six months time or twelve months time. I mean, what have we got on that? What are we thinking?
I, I tend to see link building and we tend not to call it link building. We call it digital PR because the the way of getting links is very much like your sort of traditional PR, reaching out to a newspaper, a journalist and saying, would you like us to write an article or would you like to interview us for an article in your newspaper or your magazine? And it's the same idea, you know, going out and actually speaking, you know, engaging with journalists, writers, bloggers, website owners and discussing with them would something we provide for our clients, you know, a useful piece of information? Would that sit nicely on your website and would your readers like to read it? And so it's all about still providing relevant information for another group of readers. And so it's, it's PR, it's just on the internet, not with traditional magazines really.
I mean, I guess at the risk of kind of reducing or oversimplifying things, this goes back to the whole idea that you were talking about earlier. The web is about sharing information. There are subject matter experts in every business that have useful information that other people want to know about. Right. So digital PR, and I guess the way that we build links is just by trying to find outlets or ways for those subject matter experts to talk about the things they know about.
Yeah. In a place that the readership would find it useful rather than just somewhere completely and utterly irrelevant, it's yeah, a joint, a shared interest. So you find a group of readers that share, share the interest and want to hear about the things you know about.
But it gets better than that, doesn't it?
On a on a food blog or something. here.
It gets better than that. And apologies if you if you mention this.
Um, were you not listening?
I kind of nodded off. Um, in the bit you were saying. But you've got the journal requests. Databases. Yeah. So you can go and find publications and find the right journalists. And, you know, we subscribe to a database for that. And we actually don't use that an awful lot because we get lots of requests coming our way from journalists who are wanting content. They're wanting comment, they're wanting expert comment. They're actually looking for content.
All the time. I mean, journalists have have a lot of content to produce. They've got pages to fill, they've got websites to fill. And, you know, they're always looking for experts, people who've got an opinion or people who can add something to an article that they're writing. So yeah, there's a, there's a lot of requests out there. You know, Twitter is great for getting, um, journalists requests. We sign up to a database so we get them straight in our email, which is really handy. We don't have to go and look for them. So yeah, there's, there's loads of opportunities out there. If you've got the sort of time and energy to go and hunt for them.
Yeah. And that's probably why some agencies specialise in that. I mean, we, we do a great job with it, but some agencies, it's all they do is this outreach. Um, you know, finding journalists looking for opportunities to place content, etc., and producing and place content.
Yeah. It's, it's, yeah, it's just like, just like a PR agency would specialise in, you know, speaking to journalists and, and getting column inches. So digital PR is the same idea. Um, it's just a bit easier because you've got, you know, electronic means of, of finding where the opportunities are and you don't have to keep sort of ringing journalists or buying them lunch.
Do you think with digital PR though, there's sometimes a risk that because I mean, I know this has happened to me before, where I've spent a long time building a relationship with a journalist, writing content for them. They've published the content and they've missed the link out. Right? So it happens that we're working. We're working with people who are not necessarily kind of digital savvy means that, you know, sometimes it is all kind of a little bit not futile, but we don't get out of it. What we kind of went in there hoping.
To get PR has always been like that. I mean, you can spend time with a journalist, you can be interviewed and then they can completely misrepresent you. You can be misquoted. You can, you know, buy a million lunches. And they actually never include your piece in the in the article or in the newspaper at all. So, you know, PR is, you know, you've got to kind of take a punt, you've got to put stuff out there. And there are absolutely no guarantees in PR. But I think from what I gather, Google also supposedly spots mentions that aren't links. So it should help even if it hasn't got the link. If you do enough of it, it probably will still help because it's building your profile online. Your online footprint is growing, if you like. If you want to use a horrible jargony phrase like that.
Yeah. And I guess also it's just much more natural, isn't it? At the end of the day, you know, instead of going out there and trying to find places to kind of shove your content, you're finding people who are actually interested in what you've got to say. So yeah, I guess.
It's, it's, it's, it's in an ideal world, that's how the web should be just people writing about you because they want to. Yeah. Which comes back to what we said at the beginning.
That's right. And another, uh, buzz term, guest blogging. I mean, we, as I mentioned earlier, we get lots of approaches from people who say, do you accept guest posts? I mean, what they're actually saying is, can we put a link in some content on your website, back to our website or our client's website? This is probably outreach agencies that are doing that. So it's very easy to go out and identify, um, blogs that are authoritative in authoritative in terms of their search engine rankings, trusted, if you like, by Google and you can find these blogs and then you can approach those owners and say, I will write you some great content. If I can put a link back to my client's website in that content. I mean, do we think that that is still a credible. Do we think that's still okay to do that?
Well, you're not supposed to I mean, this is the thing. Google also say that guest posting. You should put nofollow links in.
No.
It comes and goes, doesn't it? I think guest posting comes in and out of fashion.
It does. But what Alex saying I take slight issue with if money changes hands, if money changes hands, then it's then an advert. So you should definitely no follow the link. And you brought up some jargon there. No follow. So in simple terms, if you put a link from one from one web page to another, you can mark it in such a way that the search engines will ignore it. From the point of view of helping to improve authority. It's called a nofollow link, but it's a way of linking to something without saying that you necessarily are endorsing it. But going back to the point you made, if there's a if you find a blog that acts that accepts Contributions, in fact, encourages contributions, and it's a genuinely useful blog run by people who are passionate about. I use the p word passionate about a particular subject. Then they'll happily post content and let you link without nor following it to your content. It's only when money changes hands that it becomes an advertisement. Because you know what Google would say is like you have paid for that content to be there. Therefore it's now an advert and therefore you must now follow that link because otherwise you're buying and you're buying potentially credibility and you're gaming the search engines. Would you agree with that or do you still disagree?
Yeah, no, definitely. I think more the angle I was coming from is a lot of the time with guest posting, people are putting their content on sites that have nothing to do with what they're actually.
Oh yeah.
The industry.
Yeah.
More for selling, right. So it's like this whole idea that, you know, we get blog posts sometimes from, you know, completely random blogs and they're like, oh, well, you know, we'll trade a blog post or we'll write one for you. You write one for us. And it's about a subject that's got absolutely nothing to do with SEO, web design, or any of those things. Um, and I think, you know, the point there is again, that we're kind of building unnatural links, links that Google will see and say, actually, how is that relevant? Why are these people being linked to by all these random websites? And it starts to look a little bit spammy. Um, even if it's not kind of in, even if it isn't against Google guidelines per se.
You.
Know, in broad terms, the harder it is to get a link, the broad terms, the better it's going to be, the more value it's going to bring. You know, if you get an article placed on the Guardian's website and they link back to your website or your client's website, there's a good chance that if that isn't a nofollow link that that's going to read, it's going to give you real a real boost in in credibility, authority, and search rankings.
I've seen that happen. I mean, it can just turn a business around overnight. You get a mention in the Sunday Times travel section and your phones are ringing off the hook the next day. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
So that's the kind of gold standard then.
Absolutely.
That's what we're looking for is it is.
Yeah. And, and the, the, the kind of um, what's the well, whatever the opposite of the gold standard is, the standard is the x for y x for y transactional link building. And that's what a lot of, um, you know, less than credible agencies will do, you know, for five hundred quid, we will get you one hundred links. Well, if they can guarantee to get you one hundred links for five hundred quid, they're not going out and doing the hard yards. They're not actually trying to find really good quality links and producing the content that's required in order to get them and doing all of that stuff. They're going out to link farms. And, and we saw that with one of our customers.
We did.
Yeah, she'd kind of gone off on a tangent and, and, and I've bought, I've bought these links because I know that links are important. And I know you guys don't really do that. So I've gone out and bought them and they were and we did actually see like SEM rush, for example, started reporting that the. Oh, you seem to be, uh, there's a load of toxic links appeared because, you know, the tools that we use actually make a good, you know, do a good job of actually looking at link profiles and saying, hey, you know, you've got these links and they look like really shady. They look really bad. If we were you, you know, you should get rid of them. And, and we saw it.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, some of them were, were horrible. And the, the articles that had been posted on these websites that were utterly irrelevant and pretty dodgy. They were they had pictures, they had headings missing. They had gobbledygook. They weren't even proper articles. I mean, it was absolutely horrific.
Well, at its worst, you say you use the word gobbledygook, which is perfect at its worst. Um, going back maybe ten years ago when these private blog networks existed and they were really still working quite well. It really didn't matter what the word said. So you could literally have a stream of consciousness, which was something like, uh, dog castle ice cream pie fly Moz, you know what I mean? And the buy fly. Moz was a link to a site that sold fly mowers and. But all the text around it was. It was nonsensical. It wasn't even, you know, like some of the rubbish that the AI engines throw out. It wasn't even like almost, almost, you know.
Like we've seen on other people's websites, we've seen them articles that yeah, at first sight, they look like they're in English until you read them and you realise that they're not really, they're, they're kind of vaguely making sense, but they're not properly written. And that's, that's another thing, again.
That that whole idea of spun articles used to be all the rage, didn't it? It did used to pay ten pounds to, to have some AI machine spit out four hundred words that would then get posted on somebody's blog with a link.
And they really were random words with, with the, the linking text was the only bit that made sense.
It's interesting. I there's a very well known, um, protein brand that sells protein shakes and, you know, big barrels of protein and whatnot. Um, and they had built their entire business on the back of tactics like that. And I remember, um, when they asked us, the agency I was with at the time to do a link audit for them, and it was just rammed with stuff like that. But it really did sink their business as well. You know, for all that, it gave them rankings for a little bit.
Yeah. As soon as it gets found out. Yeah. Bang.
You know, one thing I will say is as we start to think about winding this up, um, if you you can employ all of the shady techniques you can do as blackhat as it as it gets, you can do all of that stuff and it absolutely, one hundred percent can work. It can improve your rankings. It can, it can create massive amounts of traffic to your website, which generates a ton of business for you. It absolutely can work, but.
There's a danger.
It doesn't work or.
And when.
It's dangerous and, and I know that, you know, if any of the the blackhat guys listen to this, you know, they'll be wetting themselves because while we're sort of talking about being ethical and building links the proper way and everything else, they're just getting on with the blackhat stuff and they're doing the bad stuff and it's.
Taking money for nothing, basically.
Basically. Yeah. And it works. And I just think, you know, now and again, Google has a massive shake up and and all that stuff kind of gets found out. I mean, and but you might think, well, so what? That's five years down the line. In the meantime, I've made a packet and I don't care. I'll just burn the website. You mentioned in a previous podcast about, about, you know, some brands are in a position where they can just crash and burn so they can just sell protein shakes. And when the website crashes, because they employed all the blackhat techniques, they just create, you know, protein shakes, website mark two with a different domain name and do it all again and then keep selling protein shakes. And that's a way of running your business, but it's not sustainable for the likes of people who we work with, who have a brand that they want to grow and build over the next, you know, fifty hundred years maybe or something like that. They want to build something real.
Well, yeah. I mean, I guess that's exactly it, isn't it? It all depends on whether or not you're building links because you want to make some quick cash right now, or whether it's because you're trying to build the profile of your brand and you want to still be married to that brand in ten years time. Because if the latter, then, you know, like you say, these tactics work now, but they definitely won't work ten years down the line. So I think it's all just about where your priorities lie.
Where your priorities are and your attitude to risk.
That's right. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Right. Well, I mean, do you think we've kind of talked that to death a little bit for now? Um, I think it's probably a subject we'll revisit at some point, almost certainly because it keeps coming around and there's, you know, different things change.
Yeah.
That's right. But I think for now, um, I think that's good. And I don't know about you, but I'm going to go play golf.
Oh lucky you. I'm not.
You're not. Okay. But because you don't play golf though isn't it. So it's not the same.
I'm going to go and walk the dog.
Oh well I would do that.
You don't have a dog.
I don't have a dog. Yeah. This is getting silly. Okay. That's great. Alex, um, who's speaking to us across the wires again? Uh, from down in lovely Perthshire. Um, we'll speak to you anon. Have a good week off because I know you've got a week off coming up and um, if anybody listening, if you've got this far, thanks very much.
Bye.