SES SJ: Link Building Basics

Ahhh, how we all love the wonderful world of link building… a world of about 25% truth and 75% speculation. I was hoping that this session would change things. Here are some interesting points and ideas that came from the link building basics session.

• Do not get links from just any website. It is best to get links from sites that are within your cyber community; that is, sites that are related to your industry in some form or fashion.
• The search engines see a mix of .com’s, .edu’s, .co.uk’s, .net’s, etc., as much better then solely a bunch of .com’s.
• Don’t link purely just for rankings. It would be foolish to pass up opportunities to link for publicity and exposure, even if they won’t help you in the rankings.
• As for the aging reciprocal link question, one of the experts had this to offer, “excessive reciprocal linking has been determined by search engines as having very low trust factors”. Does this mean reciprocal links are bad?… no. Does this mean reciprocal links are good?… no. Are you confused yet?
• Do not use the same anchor text over and over, this will raise red flags to the search engines.
• Accumulating links rapidly is NOT OK, this will for sure raise red flags. Your link growth needs to be in line with the growth of your site’s content and traffic increases.
• One of the experts made a very interesting point… edu’s are helpful but not because the .edu; they’re helpful because edu pages typically have a high page rank.

Some good points were brought to the table. However now I’m even more confused about link building. I think it’s now about 20% truth and 80% speculation!