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I was reading an old post about getting links on Matt Cutts blog. In March (2008) he posted an article that he’d written in 2005 to show that some techniques are timeless and still work.  The article is good, though I’m sure a lot of people won’t *get* it.  The real gold was in this comment, posted by a reader… (note the part I highlighted.)

As long as the focus is getting links, you’ll fail miserably. It’s like Guy Kawasaki says: “If the focus of a startup is to make money, it will fail.”

The idea that getting links is the objective is the result of bad reverse-engineering. The common idea is: “All successful, high ranking, website have many backlinks,…. therefore if my website has many backlinks, It will be successful and rank high.”

That’s like thinking: “All rich people have lots of money,.. therefore if I have lots of money, I’ll be rich.” (if you don’t understand why this is not correct, you’ll never be rich.)

Money is the result of some form of success, it is never the cause of the success. The same applies to links. Links are the result of some form of success, they never are the cause of the success.

To most this feels like a chicken and the egg problem (what’s there first? The success or the links?) If you really want to know what was there first, the chicken or the egg, then you’ll study evolution and find that neither one was there first. They evolved!

The same applies to success and links. They evolve from something else, something more basic. Trying to take evolutionairy shorts cuts by link building just doesn’t work. It may help a bit, but it hardly ever works.

Links do come by them selves, first from your friends and family, then from colleagues, then from customers, then from some newspapers, then from communities, and eventually, if you´re really good, from already recognized authorities in your field.

Most sites however, hardly get passed the colleagues and customer links. There’s a reason for that,..  But it is also necessary to recognize that in many cases, that’s all people want. Success is a very relative concept.

Posted by Peter (IMC)
http://www.brane.com.br/

Want to know the link-building methods that still work to improve your popularity? Read the article here.

According to an article in eMarketer, most people don’t believe most of what they read on the Internet.

Which, of course, means credibility can be harder to get than traffic or high ranking. Something to keep in mind, whether writing link bait or filler posts, is that everything you post can add to (or detract from) your credibility.

So… which group are you in? Color me orange.

I happened upon a blog post by Patrick Altoft of http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/, dated  Dec. 2007. He was talking about sites that belong in the Technorati Top 100 but have been “removed from the list.” Manually. Since the post was 6 months old, I decided to check current numbers.

From what I can see, TWO of the sites Patrick referred to should be in the top 5.

Alex King, creator of the “Share This” social bookmarkting plugin, has higher technorati authority than the #1 “authority” site - but isn’t listed. 

PhotoMatt, aka Matthew Mullenweg, is the founding developer of Wordpress. I’m sure a lot of the top bloggers appreciate what his baby has done for them. How sad that he’s not allowed to appear in the top 5 despite his sufficiently high technorati authority.

So while the blogging community enjoys traffic and profit that comes from the wordpress platform that is Matt’s baby, and enjoys more exposure from the social network community through the “share this” plugin Alex created - Alex and Matt clearly are not welcome in the Technorati Top 100. And that sucks.

Patrick’s article did two things for me. I found a new blog that I’ll be reading regularly (his) and it opened my eyes to what’s happening at Technorati. I think I’ll head over and see how these two Wordpress heavyweights fare in the other social networks. Watch for an update.

If you think Alex and Matt should not be edited out of the Technorati Top 100, please link to this article and help pass the word among bloggers. Thanks!