Everybody who’s ever been building links knows how difficult and time consuming it can be. Even the most experienced link builder can have a ‘hmm-I-think-I’m-stuck’ moment. During those moments, it’s good to have articles such as Rand Fishkin’s recap of his own “Give It Up” presentation. Excellent tips to get you going again.

And also:

• Eli answered a question about diminishing values on outbound links at BlueHatSEO
• Brian Chappell asked several folks their opinion about widget optimization
• Eric Enge compared the paid link stances of Google and Yahoo!
• Manoj Jasra asked Michael Gray a few link building related questions
• Micheal Martinez wrote about adding value to content through promotional links
• Rand Fishkin explains why link building and landing pages don’t mix (video)
• Jim Boykin asks what would happen if a human reviewer would take a look at your backlinks

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Are you struggling with your link requests, PR campaign or linkbait launch? The communication part is very important, and that’s why reading a post like Dee Barizo’s email template for contacting bloggers and Bob Massa’s fontstravaganza list of link request tips are certainly worth reading. Make sure to read Eric Ward’s excellent post about the link building kiss of death as well.

Normally, I don’t watch a lot of videos online. Not even viral ones. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know why either. However, I do make an exception for link building related videos (and for videos that get forwarded several times, of course ), such as Rhea Drysdale’s realistic link building tips, Stephan Spencer’s explanation about what’s in a good link and Ray Comstock’s link building videos. Excellent stuff for a Friday morning

And also:

• Link Building with customers - Justilien Gaspard
• Tying Topical Events into Your Site’s Link Building Strategies - Rebecca Kelley
• 6 Sure fire ways to re-ignite your linkbait campaign - Glen Allsopp
• Aaron Wall talks about viral marketing - Eric Enge
• Link building search queries collection - Ann Smarty
• Why links are like shoes - Carrie Hill

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Dave Eaves published the results of an excellent piece of research; he tried to determine how good the mainstream media are at linking out. It would be quite interesting to track conduct this research on a regular basis in order to see patterns. For example, I noticed a drop in outbound links from specific news websites after the last Pagerank massacre. This would require a LOT more manual work, though…

Dave Harry provided a few excellent tips on how you can use keyword research to diversify your link profile. Although he maybe went a little bit too far into depth, his post is a great read for “understanding the role that your keyword research can play as far as designating and assigning related link texts”.

And also:

• The ROI of a link - Angela Moore
• Huge drop in Google traffic? Check your links! - Barry Schwartz
• It’s a link, Jim, but not as we know it - Scotie
• Search engines and link reputation: what’s yours? - Jeffrey Smith
• Here’s how India can be good for your links - Roger Montti
• Internal links and my high school evolution - Sage Lewis
• Market networking for link building and rep management - Dave Snyder

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Tamar Weinberg pointed to an interesting topic over at the HighRankings forums about link building for big brands. Although the thread was opened over a year ago, the discussion lit up again and the subject remains interesting. A good reason to dedicate this episode of Link Building Strategies to link building for big brands.

So how do big brands build links? Well, in most cases they don’t, at least not actively. Just ‘being alive’ often is enough to attract several links a day from different places. A product launch, a CEO leaving the company, an angry customer, a study at a university or even a cool tv ad can result in fresh links. In other words, like Jill said, “they get links by virtue of their brand name”.

The link building challenge of big brands isn’t in obtaining new links, but in using the strength of these links optimally. Converting link juice isn’t very hard, but certainly worth the effort.

Make sure that your domain gets the links

It sounds pretty easy, but apparently it isn’t: put something online before you start an offline campaign. If you’re launching a new product and still have to set up a page for it when the first ads have been aired, you’re too late. Affiliates, domainers and other clever folks are fast as lightning, or at least faster than your designers. If they manage to beat you with their page or site, they will attract the links and traffic. And they’ll rank.

Another pretty hard thing to believe is that some companies still use agencies that send out press releases hosted on a third party domain. This means that every website that writes about your release will probably end up linking to your PR company. Great deal for them, but not for you. Make sure that your domain gets the juice, since you’re probably already paying them too much.

Tip number three is to set up profiles of your most important employees. In stead of linking to sources like Wikipedia, online media will link to your site more often when they’re writing about the company’s CEO, CFO or CFETWTF.

Make sure that the right page gets the links

Large companies attract links to their home page by the dozen, but you -and Google- want links to be as targeted as possible. This doesn’t mean that you have to get in touch with every single webmaster that links to your home page, but you certainly want the best links to be perfect. Contact the websites that send the most traffic, send visitors that click through to lots of different pages (do these visitors have to search for what they were looking for?), or just are extremely relevant to a specific page, and ask if they can alter the link target. After thanking them for the initial link, of course.

Get rid of the ‘click here’s

Good links can result in better rankings, but good descriptive links can result in awesome rankings. Anchor text helps, so make sure that the most relevant links and the ones coming from authority domains have the right anchor text, in stead of just your company name or ‘click here’.

Control the link juice

So, your pretty flash page managed to attract hundreds or thousands of links. Too bad that flash pages still suck for SEO and aren’t able to pass link strength to other pages on your site optimally. Make sure that the juice can flow around to pages that make you money, have the ability to rank, or -ideally- both.

Get those extra ’special’ links

The ad agencies of big brands usually know how to get offline attention, their social media specialists will hopefully manage to reach bloggers and social networks, but both probably don’t know where they can find the ’special’ spots. You know, those pages or sites that can give you that extra little boost. That’s where link building -or hiring a link builder- can mean the difference between just being a top brand and being a top brand with top rankings.

It pretty much like Brian said in the original forum thread; although big brands attract lots of links just because they exist, link building is needed to help sharpen their link profile to become more keyword targeted.

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The question ‘does only the first anchor count or not’ discussion is still pretty hot. While Johannes Beus stated that only the first anchor counts (credits), Michael Martinez tried to show that at least some of the tests are bit biased. Debra Mastaler did something that apparently nobody thought about; she just asked Matt Cutts for input. He replied, but still didn’t answer the question, unfortunately…

Yahoo! finally got in the news a few times without having Microsoft in the page’s title. Eric Enge interviewed Yahoo!’s Priyank Garg (of which Matt McGee highlighted a few interesting details) and opens with the question ‘Can you talk a little bit about the role that links play in Yahoo’s ranking algorithms?’. Well, I guess that Yahoo!’s patent for anchor text relevance in search indexing answers this pretty much.

More link building headlines:

• Small Business Link Building: grabbing the bull by the horns - Rishi Lakhani
• The end of paid links is near - Russell Jones
• What would you call linkbait if you couldn’t call it linkbait? - Lyndon Antcliff
• Trade you a smarte car for a link - Debra Mastaler
• How to get strong links for free - Brian Turner
• Rewriting the Beginners Guide: Growing popularity & links - Rand Fishkin
• What are good links, anymore? - Mark Jackson
• The power of search queries for link building - Paul Teitelman
• Explore your competitors backlinks beyond Yahoo!’s SiteExplorer - Ann Smarty
• Why in house link building sucks - Brian Turner
• Getting links from known, quality linkers - Eric Enge
• Reciprocal linking: SEO’s longstanding contradiction - Ann Smarty
• Are paid links a necessary SEO evil? - David Brown
• Link Building via word of mouth - Justilien Gaspard

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When I was playing around with my (referer) statistics a bit, I noticed that something strange was going on. After a little bit of digging, I noticed some new sort of penalty or filter. It’s not a minus 950 penalty or something like that, but more like a Till-Here-And-No-Further penalty.

Earlier this year, Wiep.net received a PageRank penalty because of a few sponsored links (not sponsoring me, though) in the footer. In that post, I said that

Some have suggested to nofollow or remove the links in the footer and to do a reinclusion request, but I’ve decided not to. In stead, I’ll do exactly what I said I will do my footer; I’ll leave the links up (which is mandatory when you use the template) until I have a new design.

Apparently, Google didn’t like this. All posts that were published before this date (including the PR penalty post) show up in Google without a problem. Every post that got published after I said that I won’t live by all rules that Google sets, however, don’t. Pages still get cached and indexed, but they just don’t show up anymore. No signal in the Google Webmaster console, btw.

So, Matt, after the #6 penalty, the -950 penalty, and other penalties, is this the Silence! penalty?

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