Link Building this week (28.2008)

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