“This week I will do a followup to my “Are You a Link Whore?” article, and I’ll have some painful admissions to make.”

Look forward to hearing your painful admissions, now that I’ve spilled my guts Eric!

This is a brilliant question. For me it boils down to intent. If you are pursuing a tactic (digging, press releases, socialinking, etc.) for the direct click traffic and not for an algorithm, then it feels less slutty to me. For example, if you have a web site that sells, say, bird feeders for humingbirds. Now lets say you are over at YahooGroups, and you discover a discussion list just for humingbird lovers. Naturally, you’d love it if these group members knew about your hummingbird feeder web site. So if you can politely get your link in front of this group, without spamming this group (like by actually joining and particpating in the exchagne of info), then you have done it for the direct traffic, not the bots. I agree with those who say this is just link whoring by another name, however, it’s not been done for search rank. This week I will do a followup to my “Are You a Link Whore?” article, and I’ll have some painful admissions to make.