The best method of building links and rapport is, of course, providing interesting, informative, and useful content to your visitors. Doing this, along with updating regularly with relevant content, is key to building a solid list of people who will link to you.

Similarly, partnering with related companies can add to this list, as your logo and/or company information will undoubtedly be listed on their web sites, linking to yours (you do the same for them, of course).

It's also good to make sure that those who link to you use adequate copy as the text of the link. If you have an SEO company and the link to your site reads "internet marketing," that is a clear picture of what your site is about, and thus you up your chances of getting a higher spot in searches. However, if you have the same SEO company and someone is linking to you with "free prescription meds," you will likely be penalized. Having a descriptive link text is even preferable to having your company name as the link.

As far as bad link building goes, first and foremost you must be wary of directories. There are hundreds of them out there currently, and while getting your link posted on so many web sites does increase awareness of your company, if the directories do not pertain to your industry or product, search engines can look at that unfavorably.

The same applies to wandering around other sites and posting comments that say, "Hey, link to www.mycompany.com." First of all, no one with any sense will link to you, and if they do, again it all has to do with relevance. If the sites linking to you are in no way related to your business, you will be penalized. Search engines aren't dumb, and they make most of the rules.

Stefanie Ulrike Dürr, member of the Search Quality Team at Google, sums it up nicely: "Always focus on the users and not on search engines when developing your optimization strategy. Ask yourself what creates value for your users. Investing in the quality of your content and thereby earning natural backlinks benefits both the users and drives more qualified traffic to your site."

Hope that helps. :)

Links:

• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/building-link-based-popu...

posted 4 months ago

Good Link - a link from an industry related web site, indexed in Google, with minimal outbound links from the linking page. Acquisition time and cost aren't as relevant as the relevancy of the website, and the all in anchor text coming from the linking web site.

Bad Link - a link from an irrelevant resource with unrelated contextual keyword targeting and more than 20 outbound on-page links.

Time is not relevant to popularity, count is, so quick or slow, it carries no weight.

Ease of acquisition has no bearing as the ease of truly high quality links is based entirely on the quality of your web site as well as the rapport you build with the webmaster of the linking site.

Ethical, well the obvious answer has to do with the quality and integrity of the link builder and how they value the stability and strength of the links they build.

The link building techniques that are utilized to acquire links, in my professional opinion, are acceptable if the best practices and guidelines of the major search engines are followed as well as the link does not risk the quality and integrity of the site in question as well as the site where the link resides.

Remember that search algorithms primary basis are to reflect the natural search habits and desired results of searchers. These are not made up figures, but data driven considerations to increase the quality of the results as they relate to end users.

posted 4 months ago

Hi Chris,

In my experience getting good links is by far the most demanding part of any search marketing campaign. The process is intrinsically time-consuming, painstaking and relatively slow to bear fruit.

As someone very focused on business benefits for clients I think a good link is one that enhances the performance of the site in some way. That could be increased PR that leads to higher rankings and hence more visits and conversions, or it could be a link that just brings a lot more good quality qualified visitors. I can think of client sites of mine where links from low PR pages, that don't seem to influence search ranking much, really drive quality visits and revenues. The best links I guess will do both - improve ranking and conversions, but I usually recommend clients go after links primarily for good quality traffic with the SEM benefits secondary.

I'm not sure there's such a thing as a 'bad' link for most people, with the inference that description has for being penalized for having it, although people do spend time and money getting links that seem to have no benefit such as reciprocal links in general or links from spammy directories. I guess Google clamping down on paid links might make them appear bad to some people but if they're driving good quality traffic I like to keep them and set up a nofollow. Which might also suggest a bad link is one you don't fully understand e.g. if you're paying for a link and don't understand the possible harm that does then that can't be good can it?

posted 4 months ago

All of the previous answers above seem pretty much on. But in reference to links from BLOGS, I have heard a lot of conversations about them loosing their weight with Google.

There are some things in the whole back link business that are very touchy and need to be handled by true professionals. Linking is an area where good things can go bad very quickly leaving you scratching your head wondering what happened.

posted 4 months ago

Treehouse SEM has put together a couple of great documents that serve as great guides for all the aspects of SEM you've mentioned here, including the ethical one.

Basic SEO and Intro. to SEM are both great reads as are the articles. Despite the obvious marketing rhetoric, Why We're Different is also a pretty informative read too.

Links:

• http://www.treehousesem.com/downloads.htm

posted 4 months ago

The overall objective of link building is creating links that have a value for the search engines and improve your rankings. These type of links typically create value for the search engines, because they indicate that your site:

- is a trusted source
- has a link popularity (because others are referring to you)
- is relevant for a specific theme

Not all links to your website will pass value. That will depend on:

1. Technical issues ; can the link be followed by the search engines? Is there a clear hyperlink with a relevant anchor text ; use of nofollow, etc..?

2. The integrity of the link itself ; is the link coming from a trusted source ; is it relevant, ...? Relevance will be passed on through the anchor text and of course there needs to be relevancy between the linking page & destination page.

When building links ; its important that you create a "natural link profile". This means that you need links from different sources:

- theme sites ; contextual relevant sites
- hubs ; sites that can be seen as a starting point within a particular domain / niche
- authority sites ; sites that are seen as an expert within their domain / business (local / global authorities) these are typical sites with a high PR

So in fact ; it's important to know upfront your current link profile to have a clear idea of the type of links you need to end up with a natural link profile.

posted 4 months ago

In short ,any link that provides value to the user - that is relevant - is defined as good link/part of a good link building campaign .

If you build your links with that in mind, you set yourself up for long term success .

posted 4 months ago

Good link building is:

Cost effective
Contains natural links
Should have quality inbound links
Is sustainable
Takes time

Bad link building may have:

Overnight hundreds and thousands on links
Out of budget
Bad neighborhood

posted 4 months ago