Three points of interesting news came out of the company formerly known as PPC Associates this year. First, my friend Kent Yunk joined them as their Vice President of Search Engine Optimization. Yes, one of the largest PPC providers is now moving into the organic search marketing space — so take that as an encouraging sign that there is still opportunity.
Second, PPC Associates is now 3Q Digital. They recently rebranded themselves to reflect their larger marketing role.
And third, 3Q Digital has partnered with Reflective Dynamics to present a Webinar next week titled Guide to Linking: Acquire Passive Links and Remove Toxic Links.
You can attend the Webinar for free; you’ll just need to join BrightTalk’s service (no fee registration). The Webinar is scheduled for 2:00 PM Eastern Time, Thursday, September 26, 2013. It lasts for 1 hour and includes a question-and-answer period.
We have talked about passive linking for years but most people may not be familiar with that terminology. Passive Link Acquisition is roughly equivalent to “earning links”; you’re not really out there embedding links on every Web page you can find.
Active Link Acquisition consists of buying links, trading links, dropping links in blog comments and forum discussions, publishing links in press releases, guest posting, etc. There are acceptable forms of active link acquisition but most people who have gotten into trouble with search engines over their links are using the more aggressive linking strategies.
The appeal of active link acquisition is obvious: you publish a few hundred links a week and your search traffic improves. The problem is that sooner or later many of those links are identified as spam. They may simply be ignored (thus you lose your search traffic) or you may be penalized (thus you lose your search traffic AND you cannot replace it).
The appeal of passive link acquisition is not yet as strong as it should be. People want that instant gratification and passive linking strategies require more time. But they can pay handsome dividends when done right and produce much, much longer lasting effects than the majority of active linking strategies.
So mark your calendars and plan to be there!