I'll start with some personal thoughts and then I'll actually tell you something interesting.
Few days ago an article on N-Grams made it on Sphinn and I noticed the first referer. I clicked to see who Sphinn-ed me and what he said. And I noticed Gab from SEOROI saying the following: (Oh GOD I can't reproduce here so I'll draw it:)
At that moment two things crossed my mind. 1st one was:
I've lived to be called a blackhat expert … my mission here is over!
2nd one is a bit darker. I do think 99.9% of the people out there would be flattered by such a description but I'm somehow paranoid and I was always right (Bear with me …). After I noticed that comment I said to myself:
You will be asked to pay for this in this life or the next.
With questions swarming in my mind I went to the blog to see if I got any new comments and moderate them. And, there was one comment standing in line. It was the paycheck I was waiting for:
This paycheck is affordable … one link, but I hate the fact that I'm always right: I knew this paycheck was on its way the moment I noticed the nice comment on Sphinn.
So I'd like to translate this. Gab noticed some potential in the post. He assumed it will be linked by people so decided to Sphinn it. He also thought it would be cool to stroke my ego and this way he'll get his link on a decent page.
This is a good reasoning and will work in 99% of the cases except this one. The thing Gab did not pay attention to is that links from comments are nofollow-ed and blocked in robots.txt. I actually did this to make sure people aren't nice to me just for linklove but because they do have something to say and I'm always ready to listen.
Actually I'm not but I'm giving some free advice. If you need a link from me just ask and the chances to get it are rather high if your site's cool. But if you think you will convince me to link to you by doing something nice for me first and then 5ubliminally forcing me to reciprocate you are so wrong. I live for mindgamez - read this please INTP: 1, 2.
The truth is once you try to play me you create a wall and my attitude becomes completely inflexible. I love to help people who ask or don't ask for my help … just don't squeeze me with the door.
PS: Gab … I would have given you the link here in this post but I really don't like redirects and it's somehow offtopic :)
And Gab was wrong about one more thing when trying to squeeze a link out of me. Please read the next post on link-building!
