Should you backlink your hubs?

Should you work hard to promote your hubs and get lots of traffic? Should you be willing to publicize your hubs, and even to shell out good money for this publicity? Or is this bad etiquette and something that could eventually get you unpublished on Hubpages? Listen to the official word on this subject as delivered by Simone Smith, of Hubpages.

Having a lot of links is good, as not only will people come to your hub from the links themselves, the search engines will bring you even more people, if you rank high by the number and quality of links that you have.

So not only is it good to be popular, it is even better to appear to be popular! Being popular means you have lots of friends. But when people know that you are popular, they will want to be friends with you even if they don't actually like you.

Search engines are like social metaphysicians, to borrow a keyword coined by Ayn Rand. Search engines don't actually read your content and make their own independent critical evaluation. They depend on other people to do their reading for them. If you can fool them into thinking that lots of other people are impressed with your hubs, they will rank you high.

And guess what, real flesh and blood people also do not make independent evaluations of everybody's writing. Nobody can read everything. So human beings have delegated a lot of their reading to search engines. This is why, if the search engines rank you high, more people will come and read you.

But what Simone is telling us in her video is: don't do it! Don't pay for backlinks! That's cheating. If we find that you've done this, your backlinking days will be over. Backlinking can backfire!

I'm lazy. I don't like to work. I'd rather be writing original content than slaving away at backlinks. I like Simone's "Approach Number One: Do Nothing." I'd like to think that I offer something of value to readers and that eventually they will discover it for themselves.

Sure, I have a Facebook account, and Twitter, and I have a blog, and a homepage,and YouTube account, and I even post on Misha's "self promotion" bulletin board, for all the good it does me. I also have a Xomba account, but I usually forget to use it. I've written a lot more hubs than I have Xomba squibs.

And no, I have never, ever paid for a backlink. However, I can't say that Google hasn't tried to tempt me. Before I even got my first payout, Google sent me a flyer asking me to advertise with them. They promised that they could get me lots of traffic for my site!

Imagine that! Traffic in return for money. Who ever heard of that concept?

Paying for a link is cheating. It's like using money to get prestige. It's like a member of the bourgeoisie buying a title, instead of earning it on the field of battle, the way you're supposed to. But... isn't that the whole point of advertising? Isn't buying ads instead of depending on word of mouth a form of cheating?

Isn't that what all of us are depending on for our payout?

The truth is that I'm happy not to pay for backlinks. It makes me feel better about myself. The best things in life should be free, and I'm not paying for another person's esteem.

And yet... isn't that the name of the game? Isn't that what drives everything we do here at Hubpages? Just something to ponder.

Copyright 2010 Aya Katz