The Sweatshop in the Digital Age

It is accepted as common knowledge, though thankfully less and less so nowadays, that exchanging links is a good way to rank better in search engines. If I link to your site and you link to my site, the thinking goes, both sites will gain an incoming link and the search engines will consider both sites more important and more deserving of a better rank in the results.

Consequently exchanging links has been a core component of SEO work.

Previously, you had to email site owners and suggest link exchanges. Then came automated link exchange management scripts, which helped you organize the links on your site, and then came massive link exchange hubs, such as LinkMarket. These were followed by the latest trend, three-way link exchanges (also referred to with the oxymoronic term "one-way link exchange"). Since search engines cottoned on to link exchanges and started disregarding exchanged links, the latest trend is to build a triangle of links between three sites, thus fooling search engine algorithms designed to detect reciprocal links.

Whether the link exchange is two way or three way, however, does not alter the fact that exchanging link is the most useless exertion of human effort in all of recorded history. Link exchanges and directory submissions might help your sites rank better, but you are spending a very long time on mundane chores that do not benefit society in any way. The Internet and search engine technology were supposed to make our lives more efficient. But there is nothing efficient about our society if you have millions of site owners spending long hours exchanging links.

If you have a huge number of people spending hours and hours exchanging links or submitting to one directory after another, what you end up with is the digital equivalent of the sweatshop. And that's why more and more SEO work is outsourced to countries like India. The Google algorithm has unwittingly created an army of mindless automatons, stuck forever behind their computer screens, spending long hours day after day on mindlessly tedious tasks such as link exchanges and directory submissions. This time could much better be spent contributing some useful information. If you are going to start exchanging links or submitting to one useless directory after another, you might as well be spending your time counting blades of grass, or building houses out of matchsticks.

Clearly, something is wrong and something needs to change, and Qassia is part of the answer. Qassia is not intended to take the effort out of website promotion work. What Qassia will do is parlay the energy generated by hard-working site owners into something useful, namely an intelligence repository. Instead of spending hours exchanging links, you can spend hours adding intel . Society directly benefits from the intel you add, and you'll find that adding intel is a lot more fun than exchanging links.

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