Opinions on 69 Solid Link Building Tactics for 2009

On late December 2008, Wiep wrote about 69 link building tactics you can use for 2009. Although we all know that search engines especially Google shifts algo hundreds of times a year, I agree on the approaches suggested on the list.

However, there are one or two that I feel need to be added another point of view just to balance.

• Breadcrumbs are a great internal linking tool. Use them for usability and anchor text differentiation.
• In-content links not only tend to have a higher click through rate and perceived trust, but are also able to add more relevance to a link because of the surrounding text.

Breadcrumbs and in-content links are usually located below the navbar. And also, links in breadcrumbs and the content may have been mentioned in the navbar. An experiment result posted on SEOMoz explains that only the first anchor text counts.

Here’s what I mean — let’s say that on your website’s homepage, you have two links to your blog. The first link is in the top level navigation, and the anchor text is “blog.” The second link is in the body of the homepage and reads “celebrity news blog.” That second link’s anchor text is NOT going to help the blog page rank for “celebrity news” because Google doesn’t appear to count the anchor text from multiple links to a target from a single URL.

The experiment was conducted on the late quarter of 2008 and Google engineers may have modified the way G works once again. But there’s also no obvious certainty that Google hasn’t evolved on this subject. Therefore, it’s necessary to keep the links in an amount that makes sense since extra links other than the first one may not be counted.

• Link to topically relevant pages on important pages of your website. Link to important pages on every (or most) topically relevant page of your website.

The above may do good to promote an article or to create awareness for blog visitors. But another research on SEOMoz which tested the Value of Anchor Text Optimized Internal Links proves that

1. Excessive Internal Anchor Text Linking / Manipulation Can Trip An Automated Penalty on Google
2. Beyond a Certain Point, Adding More Internal Links to a Page Does Not Necessarily Flow More Anchor Text Value

Sometimes, those “important pages” may be our homepage itself. In this matter, the test result shows that

Internal Anchor Text Has Very Little Impact on the Homepage

Google is being more and more humanoid in determining which page should appear on the first page of SERP and their methods in doing so seem to keep any patterned or uniform looking links out of their consideration. While I’m agree that we need to promote other relevant pages, we need to do so in the most natural way as possible. One practice I always do is writing articles based on what I’ve written before to increase the number of related articles generated by “similar post” plugins out there.

Another alternative is by adding the nofollow attribute while keeping the links visible for human visitors. If you’re having trouble adding nofollow links to links generated by WordPress, I suggest this article on How to Add Nofollow to Any WordPress Links.

• Some general directories, such as DMOZ, the Yahoo Directory and Best of the Web are still worth submitting your website to. Make sure to submit your site to the most appropriate category.

On its Webmaster Guidelines, Google used to say to “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites”, but since at least October 2008 Google removed the recommendation. Now does it mean Google starts to see links from directories as future threats? Here’s how John Mueller responded on a thread at Google Groups:

I wouldn’t necessarily assume that we’re devaluing Yahoo’s links, I just think it’s not one of the things we really need to recommend. If people think that a directory is going to bring them lots of visitors (I had a visitor from the DMOZ once), then it’s obviously fine to get listed there. It’s not something that people have to do though .

And on a live chat documentation between Matt Cutts and Maile Ohaye:

Question: Recently, you removed this suggestion: “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!” from your guidelines. Is there any chance that you will be discounting these kinds of links for ranking value in future?

Google’s Answer: There’s always the chance that we’ll discount directory links in the future. What we were seeing was quite a few novice people would see the “directory” recommendation and go out and just try to submit to a ton of directories, even if some of the directories were lower-quality or even fly-by-night directories that weren’t great for users. Right now we haven’t changed how we’re weighting directory links–we’ve only removed the directory suggestion from the webmaster guidelines.

Conclusion is, if you can depend on directories to refer to your site than you can spend some time to register your site. But if you’re not sure, it’s better to not trying so hard to get listed on the above mentioned directories since Google may not refer to those directories in the future.

There are also some points I’d like to supply some experiment results to support few points Wiep has listed.

• Use a sitemap. A good sitemap is useful for visitors, useful for search engines and, therefore, useful for you.

This is so true! And here’s the fact that support Wiep’s suggestion

When a Sitemap was submitted the average time it took for the bot to visit the new post was 14 minutes for Google and 245 minutes for Yahoo.   When no Sitemap was submitted and the bot had to crawl to the post, it took 1375 minutes for Google and 1773 for Yahoo.

I guess there’s nothing more to say. Read the rest of the pst and start building and submitting your sitemap if you haven’t!

• Identify your most linked-to pages, and make sure that the link juice flows to your most important pages from there, in a well-optimized way.

Ann Smarty from Search Engine Journal makes it easy for you to find which pages they are! She described the steps and how to

1. Find your site sub pages that have some ranking potential
2. Find more pages that are relevant to your most powerful pages
3. Interlink your pages using your important anchor text

Last but not least, before you head to Wiep’s post to read the whole 69 tactics, here are another two of them you may never heard or thought of

• Search for websites that already mention your business name or URL, but haven’t linked to your website. This works excellently in Yahoo!.
• Look for websites that mention your personal name, but currently don’t link to your site. Use Yahoo! for this as well.

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