A Tale of 2 WAHMs

The other day a topic was brought up on a group I’m on. The poster asked how to submit to Yahoo for free. Most of us involved in SEO know that you do pretty much nothing, except for getting your link on other sites. Search engines use spiders to crawl pages to index, and it’s done automatically.

I posted my reply because it’s a topic I’m passionate about, explaining how it’s done automatically. Wouldn’t you know I see a reply (which I do believe was only sent to me personally) which tells them to use free submission tools. ACK!!!!!!!!!!

I’ll admit I went off the deep end. I may have even got a little nasty. It just irritates me to no end to see very, very bad information being passed along. I feel the need to stop it as quickly as I can in hopes I’ll save someone else from doing something really stupid. Honestly, why do people not research before passing along information?

I replied stating these kind of tactics (which also included some mass link exchanges) will do nothing but get her site banned. She replied and attempted to “prove me wrong”. Gave me a term to search for and said “see there’s my site at #1, so it does work”.

*SIGH*

First off, the term she gave was something completely obscure. I checked WordTracker, and of course, it’s not searched for. It was the name of her site, so of course it came up first. If I search “A tale of 2 wahms”, of course our blog here comes up first. Does anyone search for that exact title? Not often, and if they are it’s because they are specifically looking for US. Not like we are pulling in NEW traffic there.

Second, just because she proved her site was in fact indexed meant absolutely nothing. Didn’t I just say it’s done automatically? No submitting required, I thought I made that clear. And just because it’s appearing NOW doesn’t mean it’s going to be there for long. If she keeps using free submission tools (aka spamming the submit forms), guess what? The search engines are going to tag her as a search engine spammer and boot the site.

Now if you want to get your site banned from Google, go right ahead and use submission tools. I speak from experience here, as one of my first sites I allowed to be submitted and it got banned. It took awhile and there were other factors involved, but the fact remains Google kicked it out. Luckily I was able to revive it and it seems to be safe now. But the fact remains you must not upset the Google gods, or else you will be punished.

On another note - this “self proclaimed expert” also stated “a link is a link”. Wow, that could not be farther from the truth. All links are NOT equal. If my link is stuffed on a page with 100 other links, it’s not going to be as important as on a page all by itself surrounded by related content. In fact, the chances of Google even caring about that link page stuffed link are slim to none.

Honestly, do YOU care about what links are on a link page? Do you say “I think I’ll surf pages in this person’s link directory just to kill some time”. Yeah, I didn’t think so. Also, don’t think Google isn’t on to “link exchanges”. They can see what’s just an exchange verses something you are actually recommending without getting a link back.

Now if you are serious about SEO, go do some research. Don’t just listen to my rambling or theories. Look at what others are saying and learn from their experience. Build quality sites with quality links, and the search engines will come to YOU.

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