Although there’s a lot link building related information available, high quality 101 posts with decent tips are for some reason pretty hard to find. This is one of the reasons why I find Adam Audette’s post about the fundamentals of link building is certainly worth mentioning. It provides useful information and tips and is a great read for every beginner.

According to Google, Public Relations is the most important PR (followed by Puerto Rico ). Public Relations is also the most important PR in Link Building, which is why posts like Vertical Measures’ How to get bloggers mention you without paying them is an interesting read. The best tip? ‘Press releases are supposed to reflect genuine news, so reserve them for really timely announcements, not just advertising or articles.’

And also:

• Bill Slawski discussed a patent that uses anchor text to determine the relevance of a page
• Vanessa Fox released part two of her link building series
• Stoney deGeyter explains how exposure building trumps link building
• Website Link Architecture for text links and image ALT text is the subject of Tony Adam’s latest post
• Loren Baker highlighted an interesting question: do links from foreign language sites have value? Well, I guess they do…
• Maki made a great post about how you can use reference pages to attract links and traffic
• Still buying or pushing your way in? Kevin Gibbons explains why you can’t fake your link reputation
• Bob Massa says that he doesn’t give a damn about PageRank

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Last week, I noticed that the PageRank of Wiep.net dropped from 4 to 2. The PR of all internal pages, such as the Link Value Factors, dropped with two points as well, so this is clearly a manual PageRank penalty. After discussing this with several folks, the only reason I can think of why this happened is the footer of my blog (this design is a free WP Theme). It’s either that, or it’s because I haven’t been blogging a lot lately and this is Matt’s way to let me know that I should post more often

First of all I want to stress out that I personally couldn’t care less about this penalty and this is not an “I want my PageRank back!” scream. I wouldn’t even care if Google turned it into a PR0, a greyed out PR or even a red or purple PageRank, but I do care about the reason why. If this PageRank penalty is because of the links in the footer (it actually is my only website that’s 100% clean ), it’s wrong for several reasons.

1. Lots of WP templates work with ’sponsored by’ footer and/ or blogroll links and lots of mom and pop bloggers have never heard of either paid links, Matt Cutts, or even Google. Others may think that PageRank is directly related to their rankings and will turn hysterical if they see that their PR has been lowered because of factors that they don’t know is wrong.
In stead of lowering the rankings of the advertisers, Google thinks it’s more appropriate to lower the toolbar PR of template users who -in some cases, not in my case!- don’t even know they’re doing something wrong.

2. How about ‘designed by’ links? Can your PR get lowered because of linking to your website designer as well? This is pretty much the same.

3. This actually is a penalty for linking to irrelevant websites. Besides using the WP template, I never accepted any form of payment or whatsoever, so technically, the links aren’t even paid ones.

4. Indirectly, Google’s telling people which website template they can use and which ones they can’t. It’s either breaking the template’s conditions of use (leaving the links up is mandatory), risking a lowered PageRank, or following the Rules Of Google.

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. Do you have designing skills that rock and some spare time? Drop me a note and you might just end up with a ‘designed by’ footer link. From a PR2 blog…

Until then, does someone have a green pen, so I can fill up the void on my toolbar?

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One of the favorite days in the year of every linkbaiter is coming up, so expect to see some great examples of masterbait real soon. Don’t know what I’m talking about? April Fools, of course! I can assure you that Peter van der Graaf and Patrick Altoft aren’t the only ones preparing stuff

David Naylor showed a few examples of websites that have been exposed for selling links pretty blatantly. Non of them show a (big) decrease in traffic, but buying links has never been so cheap and never been so risky. Besides David, it seems that more and more people are looking at paid links from a different perspective than, say, a year ago. Others are looking for solutions to hide their paid links (nice one, Gab ) and it’s advisable to look for more defensive options as well.

And also:

• Vanessa Fox talks about links as a larger online strategy
• Patrick Altoft took a look at DigitalPoint Coop
• It looks like Eric Enge has some kind of weekly column at SEOmoz; this week he made a post titled ‘So many ways to pursue links and so little time‘
• Justilien wrote about how you can get more links by being generous
• Ann Smarty discusses the basics of reciprocal linking and interlinking
• Curious why your linkbait campaign only got like 2 links? Matthew Henrickson listed some possible reasons why your linkbait failed.
• Garrett French explains how you can build links with email marketing

And from the SES NY:

• Link building basics (SEJ)
  
• Beyond linkbait (TopRank)
• Beyond linkbait (SER)
• Beyond linkbait (AimClear)

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I’m sure that you’ve seen Google’s General Rating Guidelines by now. I won’t explain these complete guidelines here, so visit Blogoscoped for a summary or one of the original posts at SEO BlackHat or Brian Ussery for more info about this rater’s guide.

When you read these guidelines (I’ve read it before, but it’s great to read it again as an eye opener), there are a few things you might pick up and use when you’re building links. These tips aren’t ground breaking and it also isn’t a complete list, but it’s nice to see these things confirmed by an official Google document.

1. Go for niche directories in stead of general ones.
The best links you can get are from websites that get lots of ‘vital’, ‘useful’ or ‘relevant’ ratings. Niche directories will not only pass more relevant traffic, but will also receive more positive ratings because of their specific focus. Therefore, you should definitely focus on niche directories and only the top general ones; getting hundreds of general directory links is just not worth it anymore.

2. Get links from your country.
If you’re looking for a book store in the US, the web shop of Amazon.co.uk will be rated as ‘not relevant’. And so will your link on that UK website probably (partially) as well. However, focusing on getting as much links from your country doesn’t mean that a link from BBC.co.uk isn’t valuable

3. Go for news groups, but keep it informational.
For informational queries, newsgroups which are focused on the subject and provide helpful information will receive a ‘useful’ rating. This means that these newsgroup pages might show up in the top of the SERPs, so if your link is on that page, it might receive a lot of click troughs. Remember to keep it useful for the user though, because the page might not get a ‘useful’ rating if you’ve spamming the page.

4. Offer to write FAQ’s.
Informational pages such as FAQ’s can get ‘useful’ ratings. If you offer to write an FAQ for a website you’d love to get a link from (and of course include a few links to your own website), you might be able to score a few links from a valuable, ‘useful’ informational page.

5. (Not link building related) Bonus Tip
Do you have an affiliate website and you don’t want to get labeled as a ‘thin affiliate’, which is considered as spam by Google? Adding a ‘become an affiliate’ link to your footer might help

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A very important (and often overlooked) step in the link marketing process, is identifying the linkerati. If you’re an in-hous, you’ll have to network your ass off and try to build connections with as many relevant journalists and bloggers as possible. If you build links for clients, you’ll have to do some research for every client and try to reach the most important ones. Next to using your own network, of course.

Still struggling with identifying the linkerati after reading Lyndon’s post? Than make sure to read the 17 tips for getting bloggers to write about you. This post at InformationWeek was written by Cory Doctorow, editor at BoingBoing, and therefore linkerati himself. Bookmark this post and print it out as well, because these tips are excellent. In fact, it’s a guide to getting links from BoingBoing

And also:

• Rand Fishkin recaps the keynote of SEMpdx; The bizarre economy of paid links
• Hamlet Batista explains what Link Mass is
• XMCP made a list of 7 tips for link farming in modern Google
• Aaron Wall asks when you can stop building links. Well, probably never.
• Bob Massa explains how you can easily squeeze the juice out of the low hanging fruit
• Anti Link Building dead? Dave Naylor shows that it probably isn’t.
• Barry Schwartz shows that 65% of all SEOs prefer old links over new ones.
• Loren Baker shared his link building philosophy, which really is a great read.
• Debra Mastaler talks about link prostitution and about building links while you sleep. Now THAT’s matching two posts together…
• Matt Cutts cleaned op his drafts list with this link building post.
• Ann Smarty asks if commenting on blogs as a link building strategy is link spam. If you do it properly, I certainly don’t think so, Ann
• Sage Lewis explains the first SEO link building rule: never buy paid links… until now
• Jeffrey Smith gives tips on how you can balance the diversity, velocity and volume of your links
• Ann Smarty (again) posted an FAQ about Linking in and out
• Michael VanDeMar writes about why creative thinking must come first when you’re link baiting
• Updated with: Aaron Wall states that all general directories have died now (thanks for the suggestion, Dan)

It was quite a long list this week, but feel free to leave a comment or to drop me a note if you think I still missed something that was worth mentioning

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One of the most interesting posts I came across last week was Stoney deGeyter’s collection of link building secrets. This article, which contains link building tips from 12 different link building pros, has some excellent tips. Especially the ones from Hamlet Batista and Peter vd Graaf are certainly worth reading.

Another interesting thing to see is that SEOs still can’t agree on the value of an image link. You could foresee some disagreement, but I didn’t think that the value of an image link would be this disputed. The type of link was one of the discussed items in the link value factors article as well, but it’s nice to some opinions on image links specifically.

And also:

• Patrick Altoft explains why you should aim at trust in stead of anchor text and discussed the problem of a keyword rich anchor text as well
• Justilien gave some tips for eCommerse and online retail websites that want more links
• Eric Enge mad a few great points in his post about the role of directories in link building
• Another directory post: the 8 rules of directory submissions, by Ray Comstock
• BusinessInDallas made a list of social bookmark links that are worth building

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