Sixty
Seconds of Link Building History
Link Building In
1993...
We
had a very narrow set of tools and tactics, and venues
There
were just a few crawler based search engines, like Wandex and ALIWEB, directories
like Yahoo, and a few places where people
could announce web sites, like the NCSA
What's New page and Open
Market's What's New. There was no "link analysis", no link popularity
and no Pagerank, because there was no Google. Search Engine
Optimization had nothing to do with link building, and link building was
practiced by just a handful of folks like myself. On 286's with 14.4 modems.
Link
Building and Search Rank and Content Publicity In 2008...
We
have hundreds
of tools and tactics for building links, search rank,
publicity, and "buzz".
Aside
from the typical links page, we have blogs, social bookmarking, social
networks, tagging sites, collaborative popularity sites (digg, newsvine),
toolbars and plugins (StumbleUpon), press release services, web directories,
link buying services, linking management tools.
We also
have sites being penalized for linking tactics they didn't realize were
dangerous, and we have companies all over the world claiming expertise
and selling linking related services which are 100% useless.
The
Big Change:
PageRank - http://www.google.com/technology/
Links
now serve multiple purposes and audiences
1). You have
two
audiences for your links
•
People
who click them
•
Search Engines that
count, analyze and judge them
Currently,
most people are seeking links hoping the search engines will reward them
for those links with higher rankings. While this is potentially
true,
not every site should approach link building the same way, and the overwhelming
majority of sites are pursuing ineffective linking strategies.
2). Link Type and Link
Value
•
Links
that help direct click traffic but not search rank
•
A
link that helps your search rank
•
A
link that does both
•
A
link that does neither
Links that help with direct
click traffic often generate temporary buzz, like
Yahoo
New and Notable or links from social venues like Digg,
or paid even links. Sometimes these links can help search rank as
well, which makes people do some pretty
silly things.
Links that help search rank
will originate from source sites the engines trust. Your niche's
trusted sources are different than the person sitting next to you.
A link that can help rank
and send direct click traffic is a rare and beautiful thing.
I'd show you a few hundred of these but I don't want them to get spammed.
A link that can neither help
rank or send direct click traffic is a common and useless thing.
3). Effective link building
involves a bit of public relations, linkbait, link buying, however...
The approach
required for any given web site will vary based on each site's focus, content,
and intended audience
What is an effective
link building campaign for this site?
stormwaterauthority.org
?
Would it be a link from some
web directory like this?
Would it be links from topically
relevant and editorially vetted sites like
http://www.epa.gov/ne/assistance/ceitts/stormwater/links.html
http://erf.org/links.html
These
last two link targets make sense for the above site, but...
What is an effective
linking campaign for this site?
Madagascar 2
Is it
a link from a digg
that points to a site
with a link to the site?
Is it
a link from a Yahoo
fan/discussion list for David Schwimmer ?
Is it
a link from a Wikipedia
Article ?
The point bears repeating...
The link building
/ content publicity required for any given web site will vary based on
each site's focus, content, and intended audience
