I’m not sure I’d consider myself a “poker link building expert”, but I rank in some of the search engines for the phrase. But what’s disturbing to me is some of the company I keep:
SERPs for Poker Link Building Expert:
- Google SERPs for poker link building expert
- Bing SERPs for poker link building expert
- Ask.com SERPs for poker link building expert
- Yahoo SERPs for poker link building expert
You’ll notice that my site lands in the top ten in some, but not all, of these search engines. But one page ranks well in almost all of these SERPs, and it’s a “poker link building expert wanted” type ad. But the interesting thing about the help wanted ad are the requirements they have from their potential link building expert. Below I take a look at some of their requirements and share my opinions on whether or not these requirements make sense.
400+ one-way, non-reciprocal links from PR 2+ pages with no more than 20 outbound links per page.
This request demonstrates all kinds of erroneous theories about what kind of poker linking expert you need to hire. The very first requirement, 400+ links, demonstrates a lack of understanding that it isn’t quantity that matters, it’s quality. If you can achieve your goals in the search engine results with 40 links instead of 400, wouldn’t you rather do that? Or better yet, maybe you could achieve your goals with 4 links.
Why insist on one-way, non-reciprocal links? Do you think that one-way links are somehow better than reciprocal links? (They’re not, by the way. Not necessarily. Real poker link building experts understand this.)
Why insist on PR 2+ links? Did you miss the memo about Google’s toolbar PageRank being only updated every 3 months (and even so, it’s far from accurate or useful). Would a link from a new blog post here be useless even though the PageRank for that post would show 0 for probably 3 months?
Why would you only want links from pages with 20 or fewer links on it? Did someone at Google announce that pages with more than 20 links on them don’t pass value? If you could get a link from this page, which has 54+ links on it, would you turn it down? My guess is that whoever takes this job probably won’t even try for a link on that page, which is too bad, since it’s probably a pretty good link.
The links should use the anchor text and description that we specify.
Here’s another problem. A lot of the really good places to get links from don’t let you choose your anchor text or your description. In fact, the absolute best links you can get are the ones where you don’t control the anchor text and the description.
A real llink building expert would know this, and if you’re lucky, she might even explain it to you.
Links must be in text rather than graphics.
I wouldn’t put this restriction on my poker links either. If I did get a link via an image, I’d prefer that it have descriptive alt text, but even if it didn’t, I wouldn’t turn the link down.
All links must be from different class-C ip addresses.
Another link building myth. If you could get multiple links from multiple good sites or pages on the same class-C ip address, you should jump at the chance.
A real poker linkbuilding expert would point this out pretty quickly.
Maximum of 70 links per month to avoid penalties for getting too many links too fast.
I’m not sure I agree with this either. I’m not sure where the number 70 comes from, but it seems arbitrary to me. At the same time, I’m not sure you NEED to get 70 links per month in order to compete.
Links must be on real estate related websites.
I’m sure that was a typo, or that they were using a form from another job.
You want a poker link monkey, not a poker link building “expert”.
Someone who posts a job description like this isn’t really interested in hiring a real poker link building expert at all. If they were, they’d be more interested in results than in these arbitrary limitations on the types of poker links.