Internet Marketing - What Doesn't Work

Backlinks

What was and still is the most effective means to boost your site's stature with the search engines is to have links from popular sites pointing back to your site. Essentially, well-regarded sites share some of their popularity with your site by pointing to you.

But there is no longer any easy way to do this other than what the search engines want from you. You need credible, unique, useful content that their web customers are looking for. Here is my list of what strategies don't work, or that I don't consider worth the effort.

• Scamming the Search Engines - Consider - some of the smartest people in the world work for the search engines, and it is their job to get the right information to the right web user, and not just be a tool for your business to be placed on page one. They have a vested interesting in not getting scammed, and they know very well how people do it. So the usual tricks that companies did to get rated high in Google no longer work.
• Article Submission Sites - There's a great debate about the benefit of posting hundreds, if not thousands, of articles in every article repository and blog site you can find, with links in those articles pointing back to your site (backlinks). There's software that "spins" articles, submits them in mass, updates them automatically ... all in the hope of creating hundres of backlinks that boost your site's popularity. You can hire international writers for mere dollars to create and submit endless articles about your site.
  
  Alas, the day when the search engines could be spoofed in this way are over. You'll find many that disagree with me, but many more that have come to the same, unfortunate conclusion. Google's own documentation dealing with their policy against bulk article backlinks ends any debate on this issue.
  
  But, articles posted to a select few, very credible article sites, will give you usable backlinks, and will also put your articles in front of an avid group of readers that might be interested in what your site has to offer. Therefore I do recommend creating as many valid and useful articles as you can, and try and get them accepted to these article submission sites. It is better to manually post articles to these sites, as you can often include pictures, and have more options formatting those articles (bold, italic, colors ...).
• Link Farms - You used to be able to pay a monthly fee to have links to your site placed on pages that simply listed hundreds of links to other sites, solely for the purpose of boosting the number of sites that link back to you. Google actually reduces your popularity if you do this with the wrong companies, and you could actually have your site banned from its search results. In addition, if your links are placed on sites that aren't black listed, but don't end up on pages with credible content that is similar to yours (your doggy care business is placed on a page with medical instrument sales material next to it), you will gain no benefit by being placed on those pages. Don't use link farms.
• Multiple Site Networks - If there's any way left to really game the system, it's in creating multiple sites - at least twenty - that all appear to be legitimate and separate, and point to each other, creating a wealth of legitimate backlinks to your primary site. This is almost like creating your own link farm, but without diluting or risking the system with hundreds of other site's links on your sites.
  
  There are challenges to this route. Again, the search engines know that this is possible and there's ways for them to detect this.
  
  
  • Same Hosting Domain - If all of these sites are hosted from a single host service or IP address, this signals the search engine what's going on. You could host each site on a separate hosting service, but that gets expensive. Twenty separately hosted sites costs at least $80 a month.
  • Sites that all point to each other - Multiple sites that all point to each other is another giveaway. If sites A, B, and C all point to each other in an attempt to give every site multiple backlinks and added credibility, it's pretty obvious what's going on. The search engines will catch this.
  • Unique Content - The search engines check to ensure that each site has unique and credible content. This test has become much more rigorous since 2010. Creating twenty sites with each having unique and credible content takes a lot of work.
  • Low Page Rank - Even if you do everything right and the search engines consider all twenty of your sites unique and credible, each site will still have no page rank of their own to pass on to your other sites. You're back in the business of getting traffic to those twenty sites to boost their credibility and have essentially gained nothing.
• Email Blasts - This is really pretty useless now because of spammers. The Address Lists that you can pickup for a fee have all been overused (sold over and over) and are outdated. The people on those lists have already picked up new email addresses since those old emails have been spammed to death. There are also numerous filtering applications in use, both personally and through one's own email domain, that makes spamming harder and harder to get your message through.
• Social Networking - There are those who swear by Social Networking (Facebook, MySpace ...) as a means of bringing people to your site, but it's not for me. To do this properly and not spam the system requires a lot of dedication and time forging true social relationships with people on your list. You get to know people, inquire about what they're doing, and eventually your circle will want to know more about what you're doing. It takes too much time, and not something that I can really help you with. You have to spend the time developing these relationships and filtering out all the spam.
• Ad Words - There are those who rely heavily on ad word campaigns - through Google, Facebook and other venues. For the right niche it can be cost effective - but it is expensive. To do it right you should invest in tracking which campaigns are effective and which aren't. You should experiment with a lot of different marketing approaches and closely monitor your results. This is too expensive for me both cost and time wise, though many have found good results for the effort. Even my mentors employ this route far less than they used to.