Internet Income. Lesson #87 - Lasting Principle - Part 3.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

To avoid the inherent obsolescence that preys upon any attempt to capture the workings of the Internet, the Internet Income Course has attempted to deal with lasting concepts. In this final section of the course, we continue to remind you of some of the most important of those lasting principles highlighted and explained during this course. In this Lesson, we start with a high-level concept: Everything you do should be useful for your readers and the search engines. We look specifically at Reciprocal Linking and Syndicated Content, examining how they are useful for your readers and the search engines. Then, we step back for a moment and look at how lasting principles are determined and how you, the reader, can recognize them yourself.

LASTING PRINICIPLES OF AN EVERCHANGING INTERNET

Everything you do should be useful for your readers and the search engines
Reciprocal Linking
Traditionally, the more links you had to your site the better, regardless from where they came. Today, however, Google claims to detect 'bad links' to your site and impose penalties for them. Google refers to 'bad links' as links that are "paid links or other link schemes that violate our quality guidelines." In its quality guidelines, Google advises you to avoid "tricks" intended to improve search engine rankings. Google goes on to suggest a rule of thumb that involves three questions: Would you be comfortable explaining what you have done to a competing website? Would you be comfortable explaining what you have done to a Google employee? Would you have done it if search engines did not exist? Google concludes by saying that everything you do should be guided by what is best for your users and what will make the search results useful for them. That everything you do should be guided by what is best for your users and what will make the search results useful for them has been an often stated principle in this Internet Income course.
On the other side of the coin, people are suspicious. If there are tricks, they don't want their competitors using them while they take the high road with their website going unnoticed. Many self-proclaimed "Search Engine Experts," both good intentioned and just plain sleazy, have professed to know the rules and know how to get the best results for your site. This became so prevalent that Google decided to take drastic action to stop the practice. When the folks at Google started penalizing what they determined to be "bad links" around 2012, the results were so drastic that some commentators suggested that if your site was effected, it would be better to just abandoned it and start over. That suggest some pretty serious penalties had been brought to bear.
Google's official pronouncement is that in-bound links (often called 'backlinks') are only a part of PageRank...and PageRank is only one of over 200 methods that it uses to determine the relevancy of a site. That suggests that in-bound links are a very small factor in the ranking of your site. Add to that the fact that you can be penalized for bad links and it becomes clear that Google is doing everything it can to discourage paid links and link exchanges.
Still, it is just common sense that a site with no links will never be noticed. A site with no links to it will never rank high in the search engines. You, indeed, want links, but you want those links to be what Google considers to be positive links. There is so much activity on the Internet now, it is difficult to get anyone to link to your site unless you pay them or exchange links with them. What's an Internet marketer to do?
The number and quality of in-bound links are crucial to the effectiveness of your Website. While there are many ways to obtain links to your site, Reciprocal Linking traditionally has been the one most often used. Now that this method is in question, it is back to the drawing board. There are many factors that you should keep in mind while building links to your site. Control over these factors is important not only to the optimization of your site for your particular keywords or key-phrases, but also to the survival of your site.
You can take a "do-it-yourself" approach to building links to your site or you can use linking services. As discussed above, the search engines now penalize reciprocal linking if they detect it. Recognizing that this issue would arise, ProfitPropulsion.com created MILES a few years back. MILES is a multi-party, indirect link exchange. It was design to prevent the search engines from detecting reciprocal links--and, thus, avoid the penalties. It does this by allowing one credit for linking to any site and then that credit is used to obtain a link from a third-party site (i.e. not the one to which one linked). It does not, however, completely solve the problem of the 'quality' assessment of in-bound links. While it does allow you to reject the credit to a linking site if you are not satisfied with the link, it cannot provide ultimate control, of course, over the link that was made. If that webmaster is not paying attention and does not remove the link when you reject the credit, the link will remain and may cause a penalty to your site.
In 2014, the point to keep in mind is that Search Engines judge websites in part by the number of in-bound links to the site--but, not all links are helpful--some hurt your sites ranking. What you want is quality links from quality sites that are on-subject with the subject matter of your site. You want these links to be in-context so that the flow of information from the source site to your site is smooth and logical. There are ways to obtain such links. You can offer articles, photos, awards, testimonials, or other similar content to quality sites in exchange for a link back. You can attract links simply by designing and maintaining your site to be helpful and valuable to others with quality sites on the same subject matter. Of equal importance, you should establish a presence on discussion boards and blogs dealing with the subject matter of your site. Earn the respect and trust of the Webmasters of quality sites through such networking and links to your site should result.
Syndicated Content (RSS)
Another lasting principle of Internet marketing is the importance of syndicated content. Syndicated Content, in one form or another, is here to stay. RSS remains the most important vehicle for syndicated content, although it is now more and more behind the scenes. It is still there and being used by many services, including Twitter and Facebook, but its role is not as obvious now.
Traditionally, you can use RSS technology to read the news, create and promote your own content, and publish content from a variety of sources on your own Website. You can use RSS feeds to stay informed of current information of interest to you. Most e-mail programs today can read RSS. Syndicated Content via RSS is a far reaching and powerful Internet Resource that can empower you and your business in a variety of ways.
While the best available means of utilizing RSS feeds and similar technology changes, understanding the underlying technology can be very useful. We covered RSS feeds in Lessons 36 through 39. Some of that information is now outdated, but much is still viable. Understanding the history of the technology can be helpful. Placing your content in RSS feeds, either by doing so yourself or using a service that does it for you such as a social media site, creates a good opportunity for your content to be shared...and thus seen more often.
Recognizing Lasting Principles
Let us pause for a moment from our review of the lasting principles of Internet Marketing already identified, take a step back, and think for a moment about how you, the reader, can learn to recognize for yourself these lasting principles. In Lesson 40, written several years ago, we paused and determined the lasting principles that could be seen at that time. Generalizing to the highest level we could reach, what we came up with then was these four:

1. Efficient communication of useful content;
   
2. Voice to the masses;
   
3. Distributed publishing of packaged information units; and
   
4. Fluid content guided traffic flow.

We said then that, even if you are not capable of creating useful original content, you can serve a role in the Internet's culling and sorting of information; and, thus, place yourself in the flow of Internet traffic. Properly integrating in-context links to your products and services into the flow of information across your site, you can profit from that traffic and succeed in Internet Marketing.
We also said then that the Website of the future would have a tightly designed organizational structure that allows for extensibility as countless additional working pages can be added to the site. This type of website would be seen favorably by the search engines, directories, and webmasters of similar sites because its working pages fit easily into larger information trails on the Internet. This is brought about with quality information that each page adds to the mix. It is also brought about by quality outbound links (to complimentary information on other websites) contained on these pages. We said the website of the future would be an effective selling tool through the use of appropriately placed in-context payoff links. Every new working page could be promoted separately.
We think we were on to something then. Although we may not have seen precisely how it would play out, we came pretty close. What we can see now is that Social Media came along (as an alternative to the RSS feeds we discussed then) to provide a very easy way for ordinary people to do many of these things without a great deal of technical knowledge. RSS feeds are still definitely involved, as we predicted, just in a much more invisible way than we had anticipated. They are largely invisible behind blogs and behind social media feeds.
The combination of a blog and some social media pages now easily allows one to play a role in the aggregation and distribution of information across the Internet. Successfully playing that role allows one to promote products and services and achieve success as an Internet Marketer, even though one may not be good at creating original content--much as we predicted.
As we continue in the next few lessons to review the lasting principles identified in the Internet Income Course through the years, we encourage you to try your hand at indentifying lasting principles for yourself. Our categorization scheme used in Lesson 40, creating four top level concepts, worked for us then. Were we to seek a small number of top-level concepts again today, we might have a different number of them and we might word them somewhat differently...to take into account the changes that have occurred since then. Take some time and think about how the Internet has evolved. Try to identify those things that have always been present in some form or fashion. Try to identify the things that came and went--the trends that didn't last. Of those things that have always been present in some form or fashion, try to anticipate the form they will take in the future. Knowing what will work in the near future ensures your continued success!

CONCLUSION

In this lesson, the third in the final section on lasting principles, we have revisited the importance of links and syndicated content. We have taken a step back and looked at the importance of identifying lasting principles and predicting the strategies that will be successful in the near future. We have encourage you to begin this process for yourself. Determining strategies that have always been, and will always be, important is the key to success. While the details may change, the principles should remain the same.