From reading this post “Quality Links to Your Site” at the Official Google Webmaster Blog they cite these type of links as the best.
- Participation. “…get involved in the community around your topic. Interact and contribute on forums and blogs.” Which means real and quality participation in relevant forums and blog commenting.
- Content. “If you offer long-lasting, unique and compelling content — something that lets your expertise shine — people will want to recommend it to others.” “This can help you gain lasting, merit-based links and loyal followers who generate direct traffic and “spread the word.”
- Link bait, though they point out it is usually short lived. “We’ve seen all kinds of amusing content, from ASCII art embedded in a site’s source code to funny downtime messages used as a viral marketing technique to increase the visibility of a site.”
- Relevant Directories. “There are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet. But there are not many of them in proportion to those of lower quality. If you decide to submit your site to a directory, make sure it’s on topic, moderated, and well structured.”
They specifically warn against two types of links:
- Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they’re likely to have no positive impact on your site’s performance over time.
So does that mean Article marketers are dunces? Since they hold all the cards close to their chest it would be nice if they commented on their view on Guest Blogging, Squidoo lenses (and similar sites) , RSS Directories, Social profiles, Social Bookmarking and Video and podcatsting site links. People use all those linking efforts and are getting results.
There was one comment on that post complaining how a nearly empty site with only 3 links was number one or its main term because it had the exact match domain name while the offended party has a serious deep content relevant site with many more links yet is still #2. One other commenter complained how Google created a lot of these criteria and being a small business has no time or budget for extensive SEO. I wonder what Google makes of that idea?
My take on link building is to build content links on sites where there will be viewers and readers who can be enticed to visit my clients site from the relevant content. I expect Google is fine with that concept. In addition this means Google or search engines are not the only free traffic source no matter how capricious or obscure the meaning of their Virtual Holy Grail Algorithm is there is still a reliable source of targeted traffic.
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