Have been looking at this for a while. I just published a quick post on link buying and within 10 minutes my google alerts fired me an email saying it was indexed.
Did a quick check and yes…there it is.
Willing to bet it has a lot to do with breaking news being part of the algorythm and has aspects of “freshness” to it.
We hear it all the time, paid links are blackhat, paid links are whitehat, unethical, part of the normal marketing operation of any business blah blah blah. The discussion is irrelevant whatever you think about paid links they are here to stay.
Now before Googles witch hunt it was a free for all, people throwing money at paid links, loads of sites selling links and to be honest alot of the links were junk, ad blocks or irrelevant placement. With paid links (no condom!) being “illegoogle” the world of buying links has completely changed. It has put off a great many webmasters for fear of Googles hairy side (backhand slap :-). Buying links (and not being caught) is now a lot more difficult because we all have to operate under the radar and we have to make certain demands on the way the link is presented.
I personally like this situation, buying links has become much more of a skill than it used to be and with many a webmaster unwilling to risk it, the power and value of expertly sourced paid links has increased significantly.
Just a quick one today about the basics for managing your social profile and your online reputation.
I’ll just be talking about blogs and forums because that is the area I am teaching my web monkey. Sounds easy doesn’t it - search out all the forums and blogs that discuss your niche and form a profile and pressence on there. But is it actually that easy? Well it depends on several factors.
What your current online reputation is like:
This is important if you are being hammered for service or products or whatever you firstly need to get in there transparently and let them know that you are here to help. And help you must, you will need to solve problems on an individual basis by liaising with which ever department is causing the problem. Start showing some genuine concern and make sure that your actions are consistent with what you promise.
If you aren’t being mentioned or are the subject of positive conversations great get in there transparently and interact with/thank those who are taking care of you. Be the one that people come to if they want advice or have any questions. Start to become an authority in your area.
How competitive your niche is:
If you are operating the server space for example you can be sure that there are some busy bodies keeping an eye on what is being said and where the conversations are happening. You may well find that significant figures on significant forums and blogs have reputation management as an agenda. Some are completely transparent and some are not. If you leap in and start defending or promoting a certain site you’re going to get nowhere.
For this you need to take a multi level approach. If you are being hammered see above.
You will also need to develop useful profiles on the main sites (not so transparently). Over time you can gain trust and authority and ultimately help others to see the good in your company 
Web savvy niches are going to be much harder to work than less techie filled niches. Choose your tactics wisely, think about how much time you have to put into this and what will bring you the greatest return.
How busy your “blogsphere” is:
This really comes down to a case of do you need reputation management? If you are breaking a new low traffic niche the chances are that your time is going be better spent driving traffic to that site rather than trying to interact with a community that has little or no presence.
Have a look around, if there really is no conversation going on then start one. Forums are easy to set up but require some thought to get going (think outsourcing, posting yourself under different names, get a competition going or enlist company staff to get involved). Blogs are something you should be involved with anyway, get posting.
What you are able to contribute:
This comes down again to highly skilled yet repetitive work and who you get to do it. Ideally you need an expert in your area who can really add value to the conversations and who can write well. If you do not have this then decide how much you trust this person and task them accordingly. You may ask them to post conservatively and provide you with a record of their work until you are comfortable with what they are doing or you may simply get them to find all the converstaions for someone else to tackle at a later date.
When you are getting an employee to do the majority of the work you need to keep an eye on where they are visiting and what they are posting. The simplest way I have found is for them to copy and paste the url of any thread/blog they have added to. You can cross reference this against your list of key sites and check the work at random for quality.
However you do it, make sure that you are (mostly) honest, transparent and congruent with the image you wish to portray.
It’s inevitable, as people spend more and more time online they become familiar with the internet world. Terms like SEO and RSS become commonplace and people become skilled searchers and savvy purchasers.
They’ve been burnt by the get rich quick schemes or have been cautious enough to take a good look around and have found that its the same old crap in different packages. But then, during their lurking and their reading they see blackhat mentioned and it sounds a little sexy.
Everyone in the blackhat forums and blogs talks in riddles and part conversations. They discuss programming abilities that even a skilled google searcher cannot grasp and allude to (metaphoric) pots of gold found through testing new exploits and gaming new sites and technologies.
“If only I could get to know their secrets, if i could get my hands on their tools I wouldn’t even need to be able to code i could just apply my cunning and give up my day job“.
And there it is, straight back into the fire. Not buying ebooks/cd’s that contain the money making secrets of millionaire internet marketeers but buying the secret tools that rogue marketeers have used to beat the system.
“This time it will be different because I am turning to the dark side, I am cutting my teeth in an arena where the rules don’t apply. I am not buying a get rich quick scheme I am buying tools that in the right hands will make me rich.”
Do you think that the people who came up with guestbook spamming or link farming just happened upon it or bought it in an ebook? No. They were immersed in their field and saw an opportunity. Google bombing, cookie stuffing, cloaking etc etc. These were opportunities exploited by those dedicated to what they do. These were not get rich schemes they were get rich from finding an opportunity by being an expert in your field schemes.
If you want to make money online read, learn and do. There are internet marketing millionaires that haven’t been born yet. They will grow up, learn to master whatever incarnation of internet marketing there is at that time and find an opportunity.
Marketing is marketing whatever medium you happen to be using. Blackhat simply means against the guidelines of whatever search engine. Stop thinking in terms of this tool or that technique and start thinking in terms of what need can you satisfy and why it should be you that staisfys that need.
