I recently read an old Blog Post about the subject of Linking Foot Prints and the damage they can cause if a Linking Campaign is not carried out correctly. The real reason for this is whether my inbuilt nagging suspicions that most Automated Link building Systems can actually cause more harm than good is justified or not. If anyone wants to find out more about Link Building Footprints and the upside / downside of these then take a glance at this post. It covers quite a lot about this particular subject, is not necessarily the definitive word on the subject but covers most of the basics of Link Building AND Spamming etc.

So back to my “Bete Noire” about Automated Link Building Systems.

The reason for this being that they are so automated (as the name suggests), almost everything is done for you that it is almost like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The real downside is that when you automate something, it necessarily creates a repetitive system and process to carry out this task and thereby hangs the problem, the very repetitiveness of the process itself. It is this repeated action, the repeated submission process, repeated analysis that causes the potential problem. It is all too easy to reverse engineer.

Now OK most folk would call me a complete conspiracy theorist here but all I can respectfully suggest to most readers here is that if I can come up with the logic of reverse engineering an automated Link Building Process then you can bet that Google, Yahoo/MSN et al with their seemingly endless budgets have whole teams dedicated to unwiring the latest attempts at automating a sneaky way to bypass their systems.

The answer to all of this? Programmable defects, programmable flaws or mistakes to replicate an organic Campaign. Take into consideration the Human element, the ability above all to screw up that makes the Human Race such loveable beings.

The reason behind my thinking in all of this stems from my experiences in another Industry that has also seen its fair share of Automation and “Electrification”, the Rock and Roll Industry. Back in the late 70’s and early 80’s (yes folks I am that old) amongst the vanguard of new technologies taking the Industry by storm were programmable synthesizers and Drum Machines. Now these were all very fine but once you had programmed the machine and pressed the “start” button, off it went and delivered by and large what it was supposed to do, over and over…..and over……and over again almost “ad infinitum”. The trouble with all of this is that all the songs using these techniques started to sound the same, the beats and rhythms were the same and all became very boring until some bright spark (at Yamaha I think if I am correct) came up with the idea of replicating a real Human drummer and replicating the pitfalls that used to come along with them also. OK they left out the downsides in that at least a machine was less likely to sleep with your girlfriend but you get my drift? Basically the concept was (and is correct) that there wasn’t a drummer out there (and never has been) that kept perfect time in a piece of music from start to finish. There was the odd one that came close but never any one that got it totally spot on from start to finish and that was what made the music so real, it was this very human flaw that makes music so listenable and enjoyable. So to replicate this, Programmers now started to introduce the concept of the programmable unpredictable “flam” or grace note to break things up a bit and make machines sound a bit more like humans.

So how does this all tie up with my gripe with Automated Link building Systems? Well it is this constant repetition that gets my goat. It is not a case of repetitive excellence it is more a case of just plain old repetitiveness that makes it so easy to spot and do something about.

Come on guys and gals, if you are going to try and come up with latest and best thing in automated systems then come up with something that replicates the human ability to screw up and make your programmes look like the real thing and include mistakes to make them look like the Campaign was indeed carried out by Humans and not systems.

There, got that off my chest.

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By now most of us will have read or have heard rumours of the latest changes to the terms and conditions to mighty “Web 2.0 Behemoth” Squidoo. There seems to be a pattern emerging here and it seems to follow a pre scripted route.

Web 2.0 sites get launched, there is a feeding frenzy and it is like the old days of the Wild West. There is a land rush and certain Internet Marketers tell all their followers to get their keywords listed and their pages / lenses whatever registered. Life is good for a few months and material gets indexed very quickly because Googlebot, Slurp or whatever is busy assimilating all this new content and profits are made, adsense revenue etc rises and Clickbank does very nicely out of all of this thank you very much..

Then BANG. Google wakes up to the fact that for certain keywords / research items their index is full of the same thing because…….their bot indexed the pages and did its job and now we are all wading knee deep through the same pages all describing the same items. It is the Internet equivalent of Flood Damage. Google over reacts and puts the pressure on the new Web 2.0 property usually in the form of behind the scenes pressure to make all their outgoing links (that’s inbounds to us) “nofollow” whereas before they were “dofollow” to try and stem the tide of new material. The implied threat is “do this or we’ll blanket de index your entire site”. The owners panic and enforce this new “dictat” but through inconsistencies with the nofollow attribute (yes even from within Google itself) this action doesn’t have the effect required hence the “big boots” come out and we see what happens. I am surprised Squidoo managed to hold out as long as they did as they were slapped pretty hard before but not entirely surprised when you consider the history of everything.

Unfortunately because we live in a society whether we like it or not we are controlled by and large by what the Big G says and does (Guess Orwell got it wrong and its actually Big G not Big Brother) it is going to have to take someone with enough Testosterone to stand up to the Mighty G and say “No, we will sort it out our way and not yours”. Of course this means the site will have to allocate the resource to deal with the fallout. The obvious route is to go down the existing route and have a blanket ban but have the structures in place to deal with genuine grievances and mistakes quickly and fairly.

Yes it does sadly mean that every now and then “babies will be thrown out with the bathwater” but there has to be some sort of appeals process to take this into account.

I am not trying to be an apologist for Squidoo as to be honest I have never really fathomed out how the damn thing works to best effect entirely and there are other true Squidoo experts who can advise better than I can (I apologise and grovel accordingly) but having read through the new guidelines it seems to me that they have been fairly straight up and honest about it all.

How they arbitrate the fall out and manage this will be the true test of how good their organisation is or isn’t?

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