Today, my daily small business forum announcement has 38 new discussions. I clicked on a few (14 or 15, or almost half) of them. All but one were the beginning of an article. When I clicked on 'read more' I was taken to the poster's website. All articles were written in proper English, some were blatant self-promotion, some were not so blatant at it though were still promotion. None but 1 was worth discussing.

I'm new at linkedin, though I've had an account for some years. But this is freaking spam... Well, a tad better quality than the spam links my akismet plugin catches (ata boy, Aki) but spam. The biggest spammer, an seo company (they have a 'discussion' every day). Of course, none of these discussions have any comments, followers, etc. though the day is almost gone and the group has tons of members.

Talking is not a discussion... You do start a discussion by talking, that's true. But it's only if there's thinking that preceded the opening of the mouth. Why do people not get it? I'm obviously not looking to hire an SEO expert, but if I were, I wouldn't consider the one that pops up in my 'small business forum announcements.' If they'd offer an honest to goodness observation, or one tidbit of info that was useful... I would.

Yes, I know, you're supposed to tell them what to do now how to do it, you're not supposed to give away the farm. But being 180 degrees away from giving away the farm ain't it, either.

A useful observation from an seo expert would be one like the one I've just made today: The guy who bought 3600+ backlinks from one site, disappeared from Google, asked me to help him, did follow/is following my advice: remove the backlinks. I checked last night and of the 3600+ backlinks, he only has some 1600. The result: he's back in Google... for 5, puny keywords. But he was not in the index for his company name (though it's a long one), not even when you googled his company name and added his suburb name to the search (though his company name contains the suburb name).

So, based on that, this is what I observed: Damn, I'm smart.

Secondary observation (and the one that would convince me to partake in a discussion I started): I now have the beginnings of 1st-handly-observed proof that too many links from one domain containing the same anchor text hurt you.

I thank you for wasting 2 minutes of your fine day reading my post.

By way of thanking you in a more meaningful way, here's the link to an article that discusses SEO... the comments - galore - make the article worth reading.

While reading it, note that I hate it when people say things like, Backlinks are dead. Google wants social signals now.

Because social signals are backlinks. They're just backlinks from different type of sites, backlinks that are harder to manipulate. But they ARE backlinks.

And while you think about the above, don't think I'm saying you should manipulate rankings. Or that you shouldn't. I'm just saying that social signals are backlinks.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkrogue/2012/07/20/the-death-of-seo-the-rise-of-social-pr-and-real-content/

And now, as they say in Russian, Romanian, and Swahili: Sayonara, suckers!