The Preparing for the Death of the Link Based Algorithm on Threadwatch.org discusses a Death to Link Based Algorithms posting which prompted me to foward the links and my own observations to “SEOSteve”.

SEOSteve’s name has been changed to protect the paranoid: which is Steve himself. He’s an SEO professional and a good friend of mine, lives down in the US. Big city. Great guy and a personal friend as long as we agree never to discuss politics.

SEOSteve is embarking on a very committed, in depth project which involves SE rankings. When he describes it to me I tell him he is f***ing crazy. Some times it’s hard to get a word in edge-wise when I talk to him so it was hard to articulate why. So I finally managed to accompany the above links I forwarded him with the following thoughts:

Steve:

This thread talks about sustainable business models for SEO’s and it hits what I’ve been trying to articulate for awhile: if your business model is held up by getting #1 thru 5 top organic search engine listings on some key terms, then your business model is flawed.

This is why I think you’re nuts doing …[SEO Steve’s proprietary idea and tactics deleted for the benefit of the paranoid].

Because even if you’re successful in attaining your goals you are still at the mercy of the next algorithm change or the next radical shift in the SE wars (i.e. somebody storms out of a garage and knocks Google off the top and uses completely different heuristics).

In any case, you’re going out and doing a lot of work and not accomplishing much other than still being at somebody else’s mercy, which kinda runs contrary to what people like you are all about. That’s not why you build businesses.

It seems to me you could channel the same effort into building something that users would gravitate to which would cultivate linkpop and rep on its own inertia. The SE’s will help speed the momentum as the process feeds back on itself, and it will not cripple you if they make a change.

Caveat: it may take longer.
Benefit: it’ll last longer.

-mark