A lot of my “real life” friends are engineers. Mostly mechanical engineers, but one is a software engineer. Often times I feel excluded because I am in a room full of engineers and I stand alone as a filthy capitalist. But then one day it hit me: I am an engineer.

When I first heard about “social engineering” it was in the context of phishing passwords on MySpace. Not very glamorous. However, it recently occurred to me that a lot of my SEO efforts can actually be classified as social engineering. More specifically, methods such as this or this. Those are just two examples of methods I use that I have detailed on this site. It really only scratches the surface as far as what you can do when you really put your mind to acquiring links by thinking outside of the box. Especially if you don’t mind being a little sneaky about it.

Am I saying that I go around creating fake online personalities and use them to gain access to websites that I will somehow exploit? No. I’m also not saying that I don’t!

The same software engineer I mentioned earlier recently explained to me that a lot of cases you hear about in the media relating to big companies having their security compromised are actually due to social engineering. It is more likely that someone somehow found a vulnerability on the inside (such as a clueless secretary with too much access) than a white van full of hackers in black jumpsuits plugging mysterious boxes into the back of the building.

You are always going to have competitors that are buying rankings. They will buy directory submissions, social bookmarks, regular old paid links, all that good stuff. Stuff that most of us do. By applying and creating social engineering link building methods (and succeeding) in addition to those standard methods, your competition doesn’t have a chance. Unless they evolve to that level, they simply have no access to the type of valuable links that are available. Then they go and make excuses to their clients (probably something about domain age or page loading speeds).

Perhaps you’re hoping I’m going to get a little bit more specific? Well, I think that would sort of defeat the purpose of what I’m saying here. This is a public blog, after all. I’m talking about using that big old brain of yours to come up with social engineering methods to acquire links that no one else can get. Just focus on whatever website it might be that you want to get a backlink on, and figure it out. Granted, some feats would be dang near impossible. If you can get a footer link on Google’s home page, then I will assume blackmail or something highly illegal was involved. But there are vulnerabilities everywhere. Don’t get discouraged, get excited.

In conclusion: Knowing how to use automated/paid links properly is still a very powerful weapon in your arsenal. However, without getting those few precious authority links that the other, inferior SEOs cannot access, it’s going to be a long and unexciting ride trying to make a buck, if you’re playing in anything remotely competitive.

Of course, you could always create incredible original content and optimize user experience to the point where people just can’t help but link to your site…but who has the time for that?