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[doogie88]

Well I knew about buying text links, but today was the first time I came across blog posts.
As frustrating and disappointing it is to see, it's really amazing some of the ideas people come up with to conquer google. Google changes something, bam, new method to get up top.
There is a site in my niche that has 3 sites, and I think working with a 4th, and they are all pretty high in google. I couldn't figure it out until today.

I reported them to google, but how can you really stop it? Google probably can't find every single paid link. This one site has thousands. How does the average person compete with that? A lot of them have little page rank, but there is some with 3,4,5. Still not great, but when you are in smaller niches, there aren't a ton of authority websites. Even if Google removes any link juice from these posts, it'll be too late... these months, years of being up top of google built them more than enough organic links.

These blog posts start at $5/post as well, which is pretty crazy, and goup to over $500. But to think, if you had 1,000 links for $5,000, it seems steep, but can also be a very small investment, if it brings you to the top of google in your chosen keyword.

Just wanted to share that, was a disappointing night, finding that tonight, lol.

[Randy]

As frustrating and disappointing it is to see, it's really amazing some of the ideas people come up with to conquer google. Google changes something, bam, new method to get up top.

This is a decidedly short term way of <cough>optmizing</cough> doogie. Something we refer to as Algo Chasing.

Meaning anything that works for awhile, then the Algorithm Changes a little bit, so a different approach is needed to continue to fool the search engines. I'll also point out that it's a dumb way to build a business because the business has no foundation. Especially when you consider that on average Google made over 1 algo change per day in 2007.

That's a lot of chasing!

We advocate a completely different approach, one that has stood the test of time and continues to work today. I would hazard to say that all of us here you see dispensing advice every day have worked on sites that first started ranking years ago, sites that still rank quite well for their search terms today. It's simply a different, more sensible approach to SEO. One that has worked for years and will continue to work for years.

Does this more sensible approach entail more work? Maybe on the front end, because out of necessity you have to put more thought into what your goal is and what's truly special about your site. However at the end of the day it's considerably less work, because you put in the time and effort to do it right the first time and don't have to worry about chasing some silly algo several times per year just to maintain rankings.

Does this more sensible approach take more time to gain initial rankings? Almost always Yes it does. Though depending upon the market you can still start to see some positive results fairly quickly.

It really comes down to whether you want to build your site and your business on a solid foundation or whether you want your foundation to be quicksand that is constantly trying to suck your business into an abyss.