Link Development is Dead

It's time to revisit what we do to obtain links. With both Google and Yahoo doing graph analysis for finding link manipulators, it's time to rethink the way you hunt for links. Many people think of the sandbox as a simple time issue but I believe that it's exactly what Matt Cutts has been saying all along: It's something that might appear like a sandbox to webmasters.

My bright idea is that the sandbox is a number of filters applied to a site to weed out possible rank manipulators. Add analysis for links to that filter set and you can understand why your link development program doesn't seem to be enough to break you into the serps.

Suddenly the old way of doing things looks suspect
"add url" "your keywords" might not be the best way to search for link partners. And these search operators might as well be nuked as well:

addurl.html, addsite.html, addlink.html, submiturl.html, submitsite.html, submitlink.html, add-url.html, add-site.html, add-link.html, submit-url.html, submit-site.html, submit-link.html, add_url.html, add_site.html, add_link.html, submit_url.html, submit_site.html, submit_link.html

The problem with search queries like those above is that only SEOs are using them so the end result is that they'll put you in the neighborhoods of known link manipulators. If criminals (and innocent bystanders... snicker) are being arrested on the corner of First and Main Street, doesn't it make sense not to hang out on First and Main Street?

Starting Points From Hell
The conventional wisdom used to be to use directories as starting points for link development but the way so many directories have been burned from being listed on Link Directory Lists and submitted to by SEOs from Rocklin, California to Hyderabad, India, I wouldn't depend on directories to help dig your new site out of the sandbox.

Keep it Natural... Keep it Natural
They keep telling you to keep it natural but they never tell you what it means to look natural. If you've been using the above methods for link development, you aren't looking natural.

So what does it mean to look natural? What they've always been telling you: Build a site with great content that people will want to link to, make sure that authoritative sites know about you and get them to link to you.

Time for some knee whacking
That's boring and is no way to promote a site, but that's the whole point, THEY don't want you to promote your site. Anything that smells promotional is getting whacked at the knees.

Sites whose owners know nothing about SEO or PageRank are the sites I am interested in receiving links from. Sites that are outside the SEO network. Link development is dead. Long live the development of links.

Anatomy of a Wildly Popular Website

The other day I stumbled across a successful website called, Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster that does about 40 GB of traffic (including hotlinks) every single day. The site was created as a response to the whole Intelligent Design issue.

Many of you are interested in developing strategies to creating massively popular sites (for lucre, links, or love), so the following story of this hyper-successful website (PR 7, in case you were wondering) may be of interest.

Creating a website to react to controversy or a current event is one of the oldest methods for receiving links. Blogs fit into this plan very nicely. The following is the anatomy of a website created purely for the passion of it. It was not created for links or monetary benefit. Nevertheless it has accomplished what thousands of link hungry money grubbing webmasters aspire to every day. Ha!

So let's take a peek behind the scenes of a wildly successful site that also makes decent change. The following is an interview with Bobby Henderson, the man behind the site.

Can you give me a little history of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster website?
The site was never planned. "the letter" had been written and sent
off - with no reply - for months before it occurred to me to post it
online.

Have you ever built a website before, what is your web background?
I made a website for the Roseburg, Oregon school district (www.roseburg.k12.or.us) when I was in high school.

With the FSM site, I want things to be as plain and non-shiny as possible. Screw aesthetics. I don't want it to look slick and well-designed at all. I prefer it to be just slapped together, with
new content added frequently. I love it when people give me tips to make the site better. It's received well over 100million hits at this point, so maybe there's something to this content-instead-of-shinyness thing. I've noticed that Maddox has the same sort of idea, with similar results.


What made you decide to build your website?
The idea of a Flying Spaghetti Monster was completely random. I wrote the letter at about 3am one night, for no particular reason other than I couldn't sleep. And there must have been something in news about ID that day.

After posting the letter online, it was "discovered" almost immediately. It got boingboing'ed within a couple weeks, and blew up from there. I've done zero "promotion". Promotion is fake. None of the site was planned, it has evolved over the months. Same with the whoring-out, the t-shirts,etc. None of that stuff was my idea. People asked for it, so I put it up. I can remember telling a friend that I would be shocked if one person bought a t-shirt. Now there have been around 20k sold.

To what do you attribute the support of your site from so many people?
I believe the support for the FSM project comes from spite.. there are a lot of us annoyed at these ID nuts. FSM out-googles the Discovery Institute for "intelligent design" now: #5 vs #9. That's what they get.

I get 100-200 emails a day. Depends on the news, though. I got maybe 300 emails about that "pirate" attack on the cruise-ship. Incidentally, the reason we saw no change in global weather was because they were not real pirates. Real pirates don't have machine guns and speedboats. (editors note: The FSM dogma asserts a connection between pirates and global warming)

Were you surprised at how the site took off?
Yes of course I'm surprised the site took off. And it blows my mind that it's still alive. Yesterday was the highest-traffic day yet, with 3.5 million hits (most of those hits were hotlinked images).


What advice do you have to others who have a site they want to promote?
Advice. . . ok .. here's something. A lot of people go out of their way to stop hotlinking. I go out of my to allow it - going so far as paying for the extra bandwidth to let people steal my stuff. Why?
It's all part of the propaganda machine. It would be easy enough to prevent people from hotlinking FSM images. But I WANT people to see my propaganda, so why not allow it?

It's like advertising, requiring zero effort by me. I am paying for about 40GB in bandwidth every day in just hijacked images - and it's totally worth it, because now the Flying Spaghetti Monster is everywhere.

Seeing how your deity is a flying spaghetti monster, I am curious... do you like spaghetti?
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Web 2.0 - The Ultimate Spectator Sport?

A disturbing trend with the Web 2.0 thing is that many who themselves don't do anything on the web (aside from commenting on it) are building up and defining Web 2.0. Make no mistake, the definition of Web 2.0 is evolving. The latest to put a spin on it is an IT consultant who suggests that Web 2.o is "the most massive instance possible of Service Oriented Architecture, realized on a worldwide scale and sprawling across the Web."

What is wrong with this picture?
"The world’s first blog media company, Corante is a trusted, unbiased source on technology, science and business that’s authored by highly respected thinkers, commentators and journalists..."

Many from this group of interested spectators are trying to define the game, if only to try to make sense of something they are not involved with, hands-on. This group ranges from the VC crowd, professional thinkers, and professional web voyeurs, essentially outsiders and conceptualizers.

There's nothing wrong with a group of highly respected thinkers, commentators and journalists conceptualizing on current trends but we have reached a point where they have gone past observing trends and are actually creating them. They have stepped beyond defining trends and are making them. It's important to note that more and more, the trend makers are on the outside of innovation and creation.

It gets bigger and better
The 2.0 focus on User Generated Content comes down to old fashioned community, which is at the root of the public internet. Welcome home.

Of course, what they mean is larger than a simple web forum, and they're talking about integrating community-like aspects of forums and chat programs with current and emerging technologies to create hybrids like Flickr and MySpace etc. Maybe it's time to add photosharing, video sharing, niche search and voip capability to my forum then sell it at 2.0 prices.