Now we get into more about linking. This session covered a broad scope of link strategies ranging from directory submissions to some crazy link baiting tactics. Here are some interesting points and ideas that were brought forth in the linking strategies session.
- As for directory submissions, it is best to avoid submitting to directories that have “excessive” search engine ads.
- Eric Ward made a good point that I happen to agree with. When searching for sites to get links from, he said it is not good to totally get hung up on PR; look at the site for yourself and ask yourself, “how would a link from this site benefit my client?”
- If you’re into the practice of buying links, do so from only sites that have a similar PR to sites within your industry
- Then a fun and interesting idea came up, apparently one of the latest trends involves paying college kids to link to your site from their student page, thus getting a one-way link from an edu site. I talked to the guy sitting next to me in the session, and apparently what he does is put an ad in craig’s list aimed at college students, and he pays them $100 to link to him. In my opinion this could work for the short term, but seems far from being a solid long term strategy.
So from the looks of things, there are many people that are willing to do just about anything it takes to establish one-way incoming links that they consider to be valuable to their site. However, many of these people are not considering the long term effects, which in many cases can end up hurting your rankings instead of helping.