In case you haven’t noticed, the Link Strategy Wars have heated up again. You have the SEO pundits on one side saying “you built great content and no one came” and then you have me and an occasional other voice arguing the exact opposite: “Build it and they will come always works (when done right)” and “yes, it’s easy to earn links”.

Earning links has always been easier than building them. If you want to know how to build links, go build a Website and use it to link to something. That’s how you build links. You’re piling up thousands of tons of dirt so that you can put a comfy little tent at the peak. And when you have rested and finished with that tent-on-a-peak you go build another mountain so that you can put a comfy little tent on it.

I look out from the valley and see myself surrounded by neighborhoods of houses, ramshackle buildings, and the occasional tent. You don’t have to build the mountain to put your tent up. Anyone with $5 to waste can get lots of links very quickly. Link building is simple and easy, too.

But my earned links are better than those cheap built links. My links last longer, they don’t lead to penalties, and I don’t have to replace them at more than a fraction of the rate that link spammers do.

In between these extremes you have the powerhouses throwing money into the wind, doing outreach and building widgets and trying social media and counting links in spreadsheets so that vice presidents can make a 1-slide presentation every week. I don’t worry about how many links I have earned. There is no money to be made in counting links, except by people who get paid to count links.

But let’s go back to the top of this post. I promised to explain “why it’s always easy to earn links for any Website”. If you have read this far your arms are crossed and you’re waiting for the long-winded, roundabout, convoluted argument that winds down to some obscure point that you may want to think about. But I’ll save you the trouble of reading through the next 2000 or so words. Here is the reason why it’s always easy to earn links for any Website.

All You Have to Do Is Say Something Different

That’s the hard part of earning links. People link to new things far more often than they link to endless repetition. In almost 16 years of reviewing backlinks for business owners who said it can’t be done, I have never yet met one of these “tried it and it didn’t work” guys who actually tried it.

What I mean is they settled on a formula and pounded it into the ground. 100,000 product listings won’t earn links, right? Funny, but I see thousands of links to product listings on blogs and in Web forums every year. Someone out there must be doing something different from whatever failed to work for you.

Being different is a necessity in search engine optimization. It always has been. The guy who got there before you was either different or you’re standing at least two hops back in the line from being at the top of whatever vertical you’re competing in.

There is almost no room at the top for two similar contenders. How many other Wiki sites do you see in search results behind Wikipedia? I sometimes see two, but rarely do I see them. And yet there are thousands of Wiki sites out there. It’s not just that search engines like Wikipedia. A LOT of people (and Websites) like Wikipedia. Why? Because Wikipedia was different. C2.com, according to Wikipedia, was the first true Wiki site. Have you ever heard of it? Well, they weren’t interested in pretending to be an encyclopedia. That is what made Wikipedia different.

And wikipedia wasn’t the first “online encyclopedia”. There were many of them in the 1990s. They were just so darned hard to update. Most if not all of them were handled by a small team, sometimes only 1 person. You would submit your feedback or ask to write an article and wait and wait and wait to be included in the project. Some of the old online encyclopedias got off to a roaring start and then they languished.

Wikipedia caught on because it married the Wiki software with the Encyclopedia concept (using a clever name). It was different. And despite its many flaws and failings (not to mention a declining contributor force) Wikipedia struggles on today. Now it’s different mainly because it has so much content that people don’t want to talk about any other sites. There are almost certainly better sources of information in every field of knowledge than Wikipedia but there is only one Wikipedia.

Being Different Is Critical Because of the Noise

Too many marketers lament the difficulty of “rising above the noise” and “being heard in the crowd”. When it comes to earning links there is no noise and there is no crowd. If you’re standing in a noisy crowd with your marketing you can’t possibly be doing anything different from what everyone else is doing.

When you are different you don’t have to rise above the crowd because there is no crowd around you. If you keep moving then the crowd that inevitably tries to form around you will just have to follow you. Yes, even Wikipedia has innovated from time to time. Shock! Awe! Dismay! The Website that so many of us love to hate actually broke a lot of ground for marketers. They did it through experimentation, failure, and determination — all the factors for success in the world of innovation.

Like Thomas Alva Edison, who didn’t invent the light bulb but rather a bulb that was cheap to produce and long lasting enough to have consumer appeal, Wikipedia didn’t invent anything significant. It just figured out how to produce content on the cheap (through crowd-sourcing) that has consumer appeal. Before anyone else solved the problem.

In the world of notable innovation it is a matter of “first come (to the spotlight) first served (or saluted)”. While Wikipedia was still emerging from the shadows there were indeed other crowd-sourcing projects trying to assemble a lot of encyclopedia knowledge. In fact, Project Gutenberg existed decades before Wikipedia and should have taken the lead. But I would guess that 100-year-old content doesn’t have much consumer appeal. Besides, guys like me took those free eBooks and published them on a gazillion Websites. Project Gutenberg did virtually nothing to prevent that from happening. It didn’t move, it stood still while a crowd formed around it.

Thanks to major search engines’ anti-spam efforts, of course, Project Gutenberg has survived to this day in the SERPs but it doesn’t dominate them the way it should. If you search for any of the old titles published on Project Gutenberg you’re more likely to see Wikipedia outranking it. We can argue over why that may be and mummble things like “consumer intent” but conceptually Project Gutenberg was meant to be what Wikipedia eventually became: a crowd-sourced repository of knowledge for all mankind.

Like Project Gutenberg Wikipedia also gave away its content and the spammers rolled in with their robots and their link schemes and for a while it seemed like touch-and-go. But it was so obvious where the Wiki content came from that it should be no surprise to anyone that Bing and Google finally christened Wikipedia the king of the SERPs.

You Can Be Different in Any Vertical

There is no limit to difference in search engine optimization. Being different is easier than most people think. Being different, however, requires courage because instead of chasing keywords you have to create new keywords through the difference that you make.

Through the years I have explained to many journalists that what makes them special on the Web is that they really do not have to chase keywords. They create the keywords that others chase. Alas! The wolves settled in among the sheep. Thousands of journalists were turned into mindless keyword-chasing robots. Some of them are now “SEOs” because they larned it all in the news room. True journalism died when search engine optimization became the goal of news publishing.

A few years ago I started a news Website and hired an editor. We didn’t have much of a budget but I told him he had only one responsibility: to report the news as he saw fit. Every time someone tried to squeeze a client press release into the feed I stood my ground. It the story didn’t meet the editorial guidelines it wasn’t published. Journalism came first, SEO came second.

That Website quickly gained a reputation for being a reliable source of news. Not only that, it earned a LOT of links from non-government organizations. We did no outreach. We didn’t buy any links. We didn’t distribute widgets. We put SEO aside and created an interesting resource for people that was different. We also broke some major news stories (that just happened to be about clients).

Funny what you can do when you set aside the keyword spreadsheets, the link crawling robots, and the blackhat masterplan for SERP domination.

The Difference in Being Different Is Simple but Not Obvious

A lot of people have tried to be different. So they have told me. And yet when they showed me their differences what I found were small variations in the wording of value propositions. 100 businesses can all say the exact same thing as a value proposition and yet still be successful. They create their differences in other ways.

Having explained this concept to more than a few people I have watched some of them fail. Being different isn’t anything I invented. It came about long, long ago before we stepped down from the trees. And yet we are, at heart, conformists. To be different means you have to stop conforming, you stop meeting other people’s expectations.

Many people cannot handle different — not like that. They become quite upset when they are confronted by something that confounds them.

But differences are the quantities by which we must measure success. There was only one P.T. Barnum, only one John D. Rockefeller, only one Andrew Carnegie. Napoleon had many enemies but in history he has no peers. The same can be said of Genghis Khan, Julius Caeasar, and Adolf Hitler. All of them launched wars that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands or millions of people. But each of them was different from the others and from all the people around them.

Some differences are good and some differences are bad. Among the failures I have counted among my disciples are those who tried to be different in a bad way. You can, sometimes, stir up interest through controversy but even the mindless sheeple mobs grow weary of manufactured controversy. Real controversy arises from passion, not from following a formula even if you create the formula yourself and try to make it as different as possible from everything else you have seen.

We Link to Websites because They are Different

People still link to Websites on a massive natural scale. And yet when you follow the links and filter out the marketing signal one measure rises to the top every time. People link to something familiar (they have to understand it) which nonetheless has managed to set itself apart from all the things that came before it.

Like biological evolution there is a constant rate of change in information presentation. People are always experimenting with new ideas. Most of those experiments produce little to no reaction. But once in a while you find someone who has found magic in their cereal bowl and they are pouring it out upon the masses. They stimulate such discussion (even debate) that people integrate new words into their vocabularies and set aside time out of their days to search for the meanings of those words.

And thus are keywords born out of the silliness of human experimentation. We do it for the LOLZ. We do it because we Grok the experience. We do it because we focus on something that strikes us as being different, if only a little bit, even though it is not necessarily so.

Of course, many people also link to Websites just because other people link to them. There is a threshold point (according to Percolation Theory) where all the nodes in a group become connected. In Network Theory we look for the most efficient pathway to connect all the nodes. In Link Theory you have to look at the Web as a pile of lattices of networks. Each Website in a vertical is trying to achieve Complete Connectivity and Total Saturation. None of them ever do but every now and then one crosses the threshold point and that is usually when the war is won.

There are no search algorithms that successfully compensate for this effect. It is not that link popularity or PageRank-like value trumps everything else in the algorithms. Rather, it is that along with all the links come other behaviors, other signals of value, and these collectively serve to influence the algorithms. I am not talking about “social media signals”. I am talking about EVERYTHING.

When a search engine must assess dozens, hundreds, or thousands of measurable quantities per Web page across trillions of URLs it must filter through a blog of statistical signal that is too think to even be called “noise”. It is something else, the Firmament of the Search Universe. From this clay the algorithms occasionally tease out something unique enough to be significant, something different.

Whatever it is, whatever makes that some thing special, sooner or later people will write about it and then they will link to it. That is because someone built it right for everyone to find.

You fail as an SEO (when you try to walk this path) because you try to apply all the lessons you have learned from the blogs, forums, and conferences. Rather than being different you walk the same path that has already been walked. If you want to succeed you have to leave the formulae behind and seek virgin territory. It is as endless as the human imagination and as fertile as our interests and passions.

When being different is a habit for you then you will finally see why any Website can always earn volumes of links. You just have to look at things differently to make that a habit.