John Doherty

I have interviewed a few well-regarded entrepreneurs in the past couple of months, and out of those have come the common vein of “Is the problem you are solving worth your life?”

Entrepreneurs are ideas people. We think a lot, we try to optimize our lives to find better ways of being. We are known for being eccentric, disciplined, and sometimes a bit unsatisfied with life. This way of being has very real challenges and benefits.

One challenge is that we can set out to build something that will potentially make us money, but at the end of the day we are not passionate about it and therefore are almost destined to fail from the beginning.

As David Haskell (interview coming next week) told me, “When you start a new venture, you are committed to it for at least 3 years usually. That can easily turn into a decade. We all have about four decades of work to our life. Is what you’re working on worth that?”

Read more about Validating Your Product Idea With Existential Questioning …

I started doing SEO pretty hardcore back in the very beginning of 2010 when I was working as a book publisher from a small alpine town in Switzerland. When I discovered SEO, I had no clue where it would take me (literally and metaphorically), the people I would meet, or everything I would learn and what that would push me towards.

I started full time in Philadelphia, working with a couple of other awesome guys who mentored me, taught me the importance of hustle, and made me get insanely better at my job through data. We were a powerhouse team, and I still say that if I were to go back inhouse someday I would want both of them on the team with me.

That’s not the point of this post, though. You see, this past Friday (March 15th) was the final Linklove that Distilled plans to put on. We don’t believe that linkbuilding is dead or dying, but it has definitely changed and many of the old tactics and tricks that worked so well for so long (crap directories, aggressive anchor text, spun content, sidebar widgets en masse) have gone out the window and even become toxic. I wish I could tell you all about my adventures in the past months with link removal and the insanity of the cost both in terms of effort and impact to the business being affected.

But that’s also not the point of this point.

You see, two years ago today Linklove changed my life. Read more about It All Started At Linklove …

It’s unfortunate that Google’s ranking system (quality/quantity of links) forces SEOs to try to scale everything. Reciprocating cycle.

— John Doherty (@dohertyjf) January 21, 2013

I tweeted this about a month ago when I was frustrated at Google for still allowing sites in some verticals to rank off of bad content or links simply because they are a brand and “belong” in that search result. In fact, one could argue that users expect these companies to be there. After all, it makes sense for a company like John Deere to rank for [tractors], no?

Is this fair of me, though? Is it Google’s fault that SEOs have to scale their efforts of content creation and linkbuilding to become competitive in competitive verticals?

I’ve stewed on these thoughts for a bit of time and come to a few conclusions. Many of these might not come as a shock to you, but I think they’re worth stating.

Read more about Talking about Scale in Marketing …