Links are a very important component of search engine success. Search engines normally consider links a vote of confidence, and a decent number of links from trusted sites will lead to a boost in rankings.

The linking strategies session at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York focused on how to build and handle links in your search engine marketing strategy.

The role of directories in link building

Justillien Gaspard opened the ball talking about the use of directories in link building.

Gaspard is an Internet Marketing Consultant,(Justilien Internet Marketing Solutions ), a columnist for Search Engine Watch and has authored three advanced search optimization courses for the SEMPO Institute.

Gaspard underlined that he was not talking about any type of directory. During the last couple of years there has appeared a large number of new directories made for search engine optimization purposes and not for people. “I am talking about directories made for people,� he said, “Directories that have been around since the nineties or early 2000s.�

He mentioned the Yahoo! Directory and Best of the Web as examples of directories that can be considered trusted neighbourhoods.

He also recommended niche and vertical directories. A link from a travel directory like Touristclick will be trusted by the search engines. Local directories may also be valuable, as will directories of associations, member organizations etc.

He mentioned the following directory signs of quality:

• They should be human edited
• They should have static links
• The older they are the better
• They should contain high-quality links

You should avoid directories with

• No-follow tags in links
• Site-wide link selling
• Few pages indexed by the search engines

Do not be obsessed with pagerank, Gaspard said. He looked at the number of back links to a page when judging its value.

When submitting, follow the guidelines of the directories. Some directories reject as much as 40 to 50 percent of submittals, he said. Submissions must appear natural. Vary your description and anchor text from directory to directory, so that it doesn’t look like your submission comes from automated program.

Content + research = links

When developing link worthy content for your site, you may try to solve the problems of your users. Make How-tos, FAQs, instructions, interviews, do research.

You may use keyword research to identify topics, he said. Find the top 20 results for your keywords and see what attract links. Don’t copy your competitors but create something similar. Alternatively, turn your site into one giant online resource for your field.

Corporate blogs

You may develop an advice blog or a news blog to get other bloggers to link to you. The effect of such articles go beyond the links themselves, though. Gaspard argued that bloggers may ask you for an interview or other types of input, which in turn may lead to new links.

Be proactive, though, do not wait for the links to come by themselves. Make use of newsletters and press releases, and contact top bloggers in your industry.

He stressed the importance of finding influential media: newspapers, television and radio stations and bloggers. Media directories like Gebbie Press and Burelles Luce can help you identify such outlets.

Cover their news, make some commentary and email the link to the relevant journalist. They may link back to you and ask for comments.

He also recommended taking advantage of social media. Del.icio.us, Digg, Netscape, YouTube and Myspace can be used for branding and secondary links.

Finally, he argued that you should make press releases work for the media. The traditional form of press releases may not be the best.

Links are not one currency

Jim Boykin founded We Build Pages in 1999 and is blogging at JimBoykin.com

We Build Pages has 27 employees, he said, 17 of them are full time link builders.

He underlined that links are not one currency. Some links are worth much more than others. “A link from a good site is like getting quarters and dollars,� he said. “It is the quality of the backlinks that matter and their neighborhood.�

SEO has changed during the last years

Submitting to search engines is long dead, he said. The search engines will find your site by themselves. However, if other sites don’t link to you, nothing helps.

Like Gaspard he focused on researching the backlinks to a page. Don’t use the Google toolbar or link command to measure backlinks, he said. The following command works better:

linkdomain:pandia.com –site:pandia.com

[We guess he meant using this command at yahoo.com. When testing your own site, you may also make use of the link tool at Google’s Webmaster Central]

Interlinking a lot of your own sites doesn’t work, he said. Google is a domain name registrar now, and they can access all the data they need about you and your domains.

Boykin’s link building tips:

• “Link trading is dead,â€? he said. “If you link to 500 sites and they all link back to you, well, that is like saying: Hey, I am an SEO. Come and kick me!â€?
• Buying PR8 and PR9 back links is dead. The search engines will notice.
• Pagerank to be dead. Think “trust rankâ€?.
• Who you link to plays a role as well. Don’t link to spammy people!
• The position of your link on a page also matters. Your link should be imbedded in regular paragraphs, not in a list of sponsors or at the end of the page.
• You need links to your subpages as well as to the home page, to show that your content is not empty.

Good neighbors

Search engines try to map clusters of sites, he sad, mapping the links to and from sites in your neighbourhood. You can identify a neighborhood by clicking on the Similar Pages link in Google (found below the relevant search engine listing). Similar pages share similar backlinks, Boykin said.

Another way of getting links is buying links, although this is not a practice condoned by Google. If you do buy links, contact sites that are not actively selling ads and ask them to add a keyword rich paragraph to a specific page.

To sum up, he gave the following general advice on link building:

• Produce good quality content
• Link out to other related and trusted websites
• Get good quality related/trusted places to link to you
• Get your links within the content of the webpage (i.e. links in the middle area of a page – not the header or footer – and make sure the links are surrounded by regular, cf. block level analysis)

Trust rank

Greg Boser, AKA WebGuerrilla made the final presentation.

“One of the areas people don’t understand is trust rank issue,� Boser said. “What are good links for you and for your competitor may be two different links.�

He told about one rather dubious way of generating links. It turns out some Wordpress template makers are hiding links in the code. If you buy such a link, that may generate some 5 to 6000 inbound links from people who use that template.

But here comes the tricky part. If a brand news site on a new domain does this, the search engines will understand that something is fishy (the number percentage of new as compared to old links will be unnatural).

However, if an old trusted site does this – a 1995 domain for instance — it may get away with it, as the new links seem more natural. “That same technique for a new domain will guarantee that you will never rank for Google, ever,â€? Boser said.

Boser was a strong believer in link baiting. “Those links can help a whole domain,� he said, “but the problem is that they generate links from sites that are not contextually relevant.�

At the moment this may not be a problem. Forbes has for instance pages that are not relevant to finance but still rank well. Google has determined that this is a trusted domain, and that benefits all pages. However, you need to think ahead. Google will ultimately decide to rank only pages that are relevant to Forbes’ topic (finance) high, not drugs, as it does today.

Interlinking your own sites

In the Q&A Boykin argued that it is not necessarily bad to interlink the sites you own if they have different backlinks. But if they all have the same backlinks, you should be careful.

301 redirects

Boser discussed the effect of acquisitions of older existing sites. You may keep the sites, but by using a 301 conditional redirection (i.e. a redirection that only affects the search engines) you may transfer the effect of backlinks to another, pre-existing, site.

The moderator Detlev Johnsen argued for the value of keeping your content on one domain, as the links to domain will benefit all the pages of that site. He used dell.com as an example of a site where the whole is better than the sum of its parts.

Don’t fear leaking pagerank

How many links are too much, one in audience asked. Boykin argued that there is no need to fear leaking page rank. To gain trust rank is more valuable than loosing any pagerank. You link out to trusted sites that are on the same topic, that’s more valuable. You tell the search engine what community you want to belong to.

PR shadow

Boykin argued that Google keeps the history of the people who have linked to you in the past. He called it the “PR shadow�. This means that old links may still have some effect even if they have been taken down.

The panel recommended that you check backlinks to competitors’ sites, see what they are doing and learn from them. Mine the competitor’s backilinks. Aron Wall’s back link analyzer was recommended.

They all agreed on the importance of the age of domains and sites: “Anything pre-millennium is awesome!�

More of Pandia’s Search Engine Strategies coverage.