[joegahona]

> I know someone who makes $12MM/year from high-ranking websites in extremely competitive keywords... and it's all about peddling links, really.

I am curious what you mean by "peddling links"?

> The first page of results rarely has any correlation with quality (of information/product) and more than likely the correlation is actually negative.

Isn't the first page of results supposed to be more about relevance than quality?

[anon1m0us]

Peddling links means networking with people who you can pay to link key words in their existing content or new content to your content. For example, I've had businesses contact me and say, "hey, for $100 we'll pay you to link these two words in your blog post to our website."

And also vice versa where you reach out to others to sell keywords in your content to them to improve their SEO.

> Isn't the first page of results supposed to be more about relevance than quality?

According to whom? What google tells you? If google made more money sending you to a web page with regurgitated content on it surrounded by adwords that would actually send you back to google to click on an ad making them more money, why would they send you to a high quality original source that was written in 1999 by someone who cared about the topic and got them zero revenue?