It has to be one of the more ironic linking related developments over the past couple decades. Panicked online marketers doing complete 180′s and trying to remove links they’d tried for years to get. Even more ironic is paying the same company that sold the idea of going after those (now poison) links to go remove them.

We can say “but they weren’t poison then”, or “we did what we had to do to compete”, and that’s fine, but we should not miss the absurdity of the situation many websites are in right now, and try to learn from it.

Ask yourself if you might have been better off all along using a legitimate content creation and outreach strategy that did not look to exploit algorithmic loopholes and leaks that were destined to be closed and plugged.

I’ve performed at least 1,500 linking strategy sessions over the past fifteen years. About 100 a year, a couple...