fantomNews™ — the ultimate know

Isn’t it funny how prophecies have a knack of coming true sometimes? One month ago we did a cartoon taking a shot at Google’s hypocritical FUD tactics regarding paid links by fantasizing about what a pair of hardnosed mobsters would do to take advantage of this positively silly state of affairs. Now, it seems that a high profile company like Shopzilla has actually started to pay for link removal!

Unabashed by the ongoing, FUD dominated discussion concerning paid links as fueled by the Google self-declared Noevilers, this crowd has blithely launched a new link building service with a twist: Rather than pay through the nose on a monthly basis, as is customary, you’re only set back by one-time fees for any PR1-PR5 link.

What with the ongoing FUD tactics pursued by Google & Co. trashing paid links and junking up the industry forums and blogs with all the buzz this creates, out comes - entirely expectably - a super duper tool claiming to have mastered the technology to detect said paid links. So can they? Well, if so, here’s some very revealing stuff - and remember you read it here first!

Here are two cool tools that let you get free backlinks from Squidoo lenses, Hubpages and lots of blogs on various platforms

With its controversial anti-paid links stance Google has managed to achieve what only a couple of years ago most people would have thought almost impossible: Provoke an industry wide outrage, accompanied by tons of bad feelings, as demonstrated in a turbulent session at SES San Jose.

Seems that in the cause of pimping their Checkout servicel, Google feels that just about any means will justify the end - including violating their own Webmaster Guidelines re paid links.

Now, you can get some indication why your story got trashed at Digg.

Determine a slew of links with pertinent Google searches displaying places you’ll likely want to get some inlinks from, all in speed demon mode.

There’s some indication that Google’s handling of their Supplemental Index may be in for a dramatic change in terms of links being allowed to pass anchor text in future. If confirmed, it would constitute a fairly dramatic turnaround in their ranking policy.

Here’s a new service offering tons of targeted blog comments to boost your link building efforts. However, caveat emptor: Seems they still need to address a few not-so-minor issues before they’ll actually be able to make their mark.

Good, affordable link building networks aren’t exactly a dime a dozen these days. Here’s a new one (still in pre-launch) that seems both well conceived and very promising even though there’s still some scope for improvement.

Link building fads come and go, like practically everything else in search marketing, and it’s always a good idea to review strategies further down the road after the initial hoopla has abated. Sponsoring Wordpress themes for linklove is no exception.

Essentially, Michael Martinez is revealing (well, re-uncovering, actually) a very fundamental concept all black hat SEOs (and no: I’m not implying that he’s one himself) have known about and gleefully leveraged for ages: Links do count, yes; and so does their “relevance” – but not in the nonsensical and utterly illogical way most people in SEO seem to have adopted in a concerted operation of building their cargo cult of collective techno superstitions.