Link building is a laborious, slow and sometimes painful task of contacting webmasters and bloggers for that elusive link back. However, it’s not as easy as it seems as many people are looking at your website and thinking: “What’s in it for my users and my website?”. Many people have suggested ways of approaching linkbacks. Jai Nischal Verma suggested the ten commandments of link building:-

1. Link Exchange
2. Social Bookmarking Websites
3. Link Baiting
4. Web Directory Submissions
5. Article Submissions
6. Press Releases
7. Blog Commenting
8. Forum Posts
9. Link Programs
10. Creating Contests

If we examine the list , I’ll be critical of Link exhanges as we well know reciprocal linking is not beneficial for your SEO. It can bring traffic but won’t bring the desired boost needed. Blog commenting only works for some that do not implement the no follow tag and forum posting also has its drawbacks. It’s not a list that could be easily implemented as a solution for all websites.

Depending on your website theme, the ten commandments of link building is helpful but should only be followed in part. For example, I have a client that specializes in parking solutions(!). I would certainly have a problem going about blog commenting or social book marking into the website without usable content which would excite a reader!

Let’s have a look at Google’s own take on Links:

1. Avoid Me-too or irrelevant content that gives users no reason to visit your site.
2. Avoid broken links and incorrect HTML.
3. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)
4. Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
5. Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines.
6. Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
7. Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank.
8. Avoid valueless links from unrelated websites
9. Avoid links from low PageRank pages with many outgoing links
10. Avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web.

The most interesting point is #9 which states that people should avoid links from pages with low page rank with many external links. Obviously this is referring possibly to the practice of link farming. However, it is interesting that Google emphasizes its own PageRank measurements as a yardstick to a good or bad site. It is still a controversial point amongst SEO but I have taken more notice of PR of late ever since Google began dropping sites which engaged in Pay per linking. Not to say I’m completely won over by the whole PR argument but I do take notice of it when sourcing potential websites. The main thing I look for over and over again is the quality of the website (authority), how recently it was updated and of course, theme relevancy.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 3:16 pm and is filed under Link Building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.