Link Directory Genocide - What you can do about it

“So now what should I do?” you ask.  Well, that’s a difficult question to answer, and it would certainly depend on what you intend to offer to your audience.  If you are truly about helping to collect information that will be valuable to surfers, then by all means do so, but make sure you add quality (and relevant) content to your pages, and not just a bunch of meaningless links.  Further, concentrate heavily on achieving high quality inbound links from reputable websites.  For those of you who have tried to get those precious links, then you know exactly how hard it is to do so.  No one ever said it would be easy, and anything worth achieving usually isn’t.

I want to pause once again to give you a word of advice: this article is not intended to scare you away from sharing outbound links, or to keep you away from linking to other websites.  After all, with the great roadmap of the internet, if you take away your ability to link to other relevant sites, then you remove the opportunity for a search engine spider to crawl among sites effectively.  Search engine spiders need to be able to not only easily crawl from page to page on one website, but also from one website to another.  (In another article, I will talk about why I feel being stingy with links may end up hurting you in the long run.)

I find it important to emphasize again and again how crucial it is to provide your website to people, and not try to please the search engines, or exist solely for the purpose of PageRank.  Ultimately, Google is as fickle as my cat, and no one knows what Google wants next or which way it will choose to swing the Reaper’s sickle.  You could spend your time running in circles, chasing your tail whenever Google makes a major change, or you can sit back, learn, and understand what Google really wants for the web: relevant sites with valuable content that will make people WANT to search for your site.  My advice is not to try to please Google, but rather to please your audience instead.  This is what divides the good marketers from those who haven’t a clue, and by catering to your audience you will keep your website away from the executioner’s axe.

These words may seem especially harsh to those who have great directories of great links to great sites, but there comes a time when the horse and buggy must be replaced by the automobile.  Times are a-changin’, and either we roll with the punches, or we will get left behind; battered, broken, and trampled on the mat.  My suggestion to you is to have valuable and unique content so that not only Google stays the execution, but so that your site visitors actually have something to read, and want to keep coming back to it.  After all, it is the content to be read that makes the Internet a useful tool at all.

For information about Jennifer Sullivan Cassidy's professional search engine optimization services, please visit her site at First Class SEO.