Ethics of Link Popularity

What is an ethical link popularity scheme?
Right now, the search engine optimization world sits at a point where 95% of practitioners and site owners operate like this...

1.) Word starts to spread that links help your site.

2.) Site owners and marketers rush out to get any and every link that they can.

3.) Word spreads that reciprocal links are pretty easy to get.

4.) Site owners and marketers start spamming the world with link exchange requests.

5.) Word spreads that one-way links "count more."

6.) Site owners and marketers start buying links in a rush to gain those one-ways.

7.) Word spreads that you can "earn" links with great content.

8.) Site owners and marketers start to grumble about how much work this SEO thing is.

Anyone else noticing a pattern?

What tends to happen in this industry is the development of the leaders and the lemmings. The leaders are the those that are out there in the trenches, testing and working and researching to figure out what has an impact. They then share their findings with the lemmings who rush out to implement those findings with no thought as to "why" they are making those changes. The simple fact that the change may help their site is enough of a reason for them.

But that's not good enough.

To see this industry progress, we need to focus on teaching people why the search engines place more value on earned one way links or why content needs to be relevant and engaging rather than mathematically formulated to have the proper number of keywords.

Site owners and marketers need to learn more about how people judge the value of a web site so that they can understand and even anticipate where algorithms may go in the future.

A little common sense applied two or three years ago would have easily made it clear that earned, unsolicited links showed a more honest representation of value than links that were traded or paid for. With that in mind, site owners could have had a hefty head start by spending their time building great content rather than chasing down the next link.

As we move into the future, issues like latent semantic indexing and personalized search will play a powerful role in how search engines put together and deliver results. By taking the time to teach site owners about these concepts and how they might be applied, the SEO industry will be able to teach people how to anticipate what search engines will be looking for, rather than letting those same people play a non-stop game of "catch-up."

Courtesy: http://www.searchengineguide.com/laycock/007454.html