Link building - Lambs to the slaughter
The SEO industry has become quite a competitive industry. Agencies are fighting over the clients with the deep pockets, web sites are fighting over the best rankings on the best converting keywords.
Now imagine you are a top SEO, and also speak at conferences like SMX advanced. You sit in a panel about link building. You can do two things…
- Share all your best knowledge and hope there are potential clients in the audience
- Or you can preach all gray & black hat tricks out of the book, and tell the audience that these still work
The first will get you some potential clients dropping their business card after the session, and you probably have given away all your tricks.
The second could have a more competitive effect, where you could find yourself in a pretty good position if it all works out.
Let me explain; In the panel, Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques, were a couple of people who have been, or it seems, experimented with buying links for competitors sites. The intention was really to burn those sites in the ground or messing up the link profile so they could buy some good links as well, and have their site better ranked. Smoothening the level playing field. Now if you do that a couple of times, this might cost you quite a lot of money.
Divide & conquer
If you are a A-list SEO link builder, speaking in a panel, you might be able to influence the audience opinion on controversial tactics like link buying.
You tell everybody that it works, and you definitely should buy as many links as you can, because it works.
By convincing the audience that they have to spend more on buying links, you can wipe out your competition through just one conference speech. (remember, Matt is in the room!)
This is why I thought the panel was pretty smart, at least if this were their intentions… The smartest SEO expert is the one that makes all the others believe something, and then benefits the most of all the following behavior of the sheep. As lambs to the slaughter…