Keep in mind Google’s mission: To build the “perfect search engine” that “understands exactly what you mean and gives back exactly what you want”.
At Market Pipeline (my former company, that I founded) we have followed Google’s guidelines. Depending on how aggressive our customer wanted to be and how many resources they wanted to deploy, we did our best to improve traffic to our customer’s web sites. In essence, we were creating “Google Juice” for our customers using techniques such as comments on industry related blogs, article marketing and directory insertions. Just a couple years ago these were accepted techniques for good search engine optimization (SEO). Now these techniques are in the ruble of “unethical” tactics Google discourages.
Again…keep in mind Google’s mission; “The perfect search engine.”
As early as last week I was encourage by my Internet Marketing Consultant at HubSpot to start guest posting to improve inbound traffic to www.marketpipeline.com. I had started to make arrangements with other industrial web marketing blogs for guest posting. Hold on bucko!
Keep in mind that HubSpot is at the forefront of great marketing and ethical practices. HubSpot will not even allow you to insert data from purchased contact lists into their system. If you send out an e-mail blast they want your contacts to be your current customers or earned from other online activities. No purchased lists! So…I have always considered advice from HubSpot as “the right thing to do” for B2B lead generation and our industrial manufacturers and industrial suppliers.
Then this past week, Matt Cutts, the head of “spam police” at Google says that guest blogging is now discouraged. Why? Because so many folks abused guest blogging for link building purposes.
Think…”The perfect search engine.”
As an industrial marketer, Google wants you to EARN your links by creating good content that your customers love and consume. Period.
As I have said many times on this blog, this is a huge cultural leap for my industrial marketing friends. But NOW is the time to start the journey down the content marketing road and start to earn your links and your visibility online. Just like you earned your reputation off line, this will take thought, creativity and persistence.
Need more proof? Here is the latest from Search Engine Journal, a reliable source for B2B lead generation and our industrial web marketing community.
Content marketing for manufacturers is a must.
“By Tom Repp”
