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Googler Adam Lasnik answered some questions in a 3-part interview you can watch on YouTube. In the course of answering questions, he pretty much shot down a lot of “conventional SEO wisdom” regarding link building “best practices”.

To be honest, Adam’s long cautionary discussion outruns the actual advice. The things he asks Webmasters not to do they are going to do anyway because those methods still work. Nonetheless, Adam dips into the bag of old school tips and techniques to help new Webmasters build links.

You can watch Adam’s answer here but basically he gracefully walks out of the corner he seems to have painted himself into.

“Don’t do this and don’t do that,” he says — knocking down every simple, easy link building tip you’ll find on the most popular and least read SEO blogs. “So how do you get good links if you’re not allowed to buy, trade, or steal them?” you might ask.

Basically, Adam advises people to position themselves as helpful experts in online communities. Interact with others on the Internet and give them the benefit of your real knowledge and experience. That doesn’t mean set up shop as a new expert and start repeating advice you find on SEO blogs and forums.

It means that if you’re a real business person with expertise in a specific field, you can provide value to online communities that will appreciate the help you provide to them. Adam’s advice is advice that I and other people have shared for years. It’s sound, basic, good, old-fashioned, do-it-yourself marketing. It works just as well now as ever before and it comes bound up with one advantage you won’t find in link building: by following Adam’s advice, you make search engines less important to your marketing efforts — that means you’ll be less susceptible to the tender mercies of changes in search results.

There is another piece of information that Adam offers in that interview which I’ve been mulling over. He says that getting links from relevant content is as important as your title tag. Now, plenty of SEOs have been preaching the relevant link myth for years.

Adam’s advice strikes me as a classy piece of propaganda intended to persuade new and impressionable Webmasters away from irrelevant link dropping — which works just fine if you can get away with it (and, of course, Google wants everyone to remember that you don’t always get away with it).

I’m no fan of link dropping. In fact, I hate link droppers. They are either spammers or very stupid, very ignorant, or very impressionable wannabe SEOs who have been reading the wrong blogs and forums. Link building is the least efficient part of the search engine optimization process, but obtaining only relevant links makes that process even more inefficient because — frankly — it ain’t easy to get relevant links to your site.

Think about it. You create a huge piece of link bait and 40,000 sites link to your content. Woohoo! You’ve hit the link jackpot, right? Wrong — if we’re to take Adam’s advice at face value. After all, the most important, most valuable links will be the links from the relevant content, right? Are there really 40,000 sites out there that are relevant to your own site?

If links must be embedded in relevant content in order to count with Google, we’re all screwed. We’ll never link drop again — we’ll just start dropping content.

But the point of Adam’s advice, I think, is to get new Webmasters to think about participating in communities and not to look beyond those communities for opportunities to steal links from blogs, forums, and other “open link resources”. I will assume good intent on Adam’s part and suggest he is merely trying to keep people on the better path to success.

It could be, however, that he really did let a piece of the algorithmic pie slip out the door. Maybe links embedded in relevant content really do work better now. I’m sure many people in the SEO community will come along and claim their testing proves this is so. Frankly, I wouldn’t trust an SEO’s test results farther than I could throw them — we saw recently just how sharp the SEO community is when it comes to testing. (Anyone remember all those claims about how PageRank sculpting was working — all made while Google had already defused the technique for many months?) Cf. Why your nofollow testing sucks and Why Your Linking Tests Suck.

Google’s link filters and ranking algorithms are no doubt extremely complex processes. You could probably do worse than to assume that getting links from content relevant to your own content are better than getting links from irrelevant content — but don’t fly in to a panic and go ask SEOs if you should ask people to take down links in irrelevant content (I have really actually seen people ask this type of question).

If you’re getting irrelevant links, keep them for whatever value they pass. They may pass a LOT of value. But keep in mind that Google is asking people to look for links in relevant content. When the next great SEO technique comes along (call it Relevance Sculpting), ignore the SEO community and focus on the fact that Google is offering some helpful hints. Don’t obsess over exactly how to take advantage of a very small statement.

For now, keep thinking about how to obtain credible links and leave the “Credibility Sculpting” to the scammers, idiots, and expert SEOs.

And go watch Adam’s video. It’s not Monday Night Football but it isn’t THAT long, either (and you can jump around the interview through the index links in the margin).

Too many SEOs focus all their efforts on Google search optimization. While that is bad for the industry overall (it makes us look unprofessional and ineffective), it does leave opportunities for people who want to bring more search referral traffic to their own sites.

2-dimensional SEO is search engine-specific. It doesn’t matter which search engine you’re focusing on (some people do focus on other search engines). You’re being 2-dimensional because your only looking at two vectors: the search engine’s algorithms and the query set for which you have targeted. When you expand your optimization to include more search engines you’re adding a third dimension to your SEO.

Here are a few tips for expanding your search space into 3-dimensions:

Track all the major search engines - Some SEOs do this as a means of looking comprehensive to their clients, but they don’t bother to research queries on more than one search engine. Hence, they often track non-performing queries on other search engines. You have to work with the demographics of each search engine and use its own keyword tools only to analyze its own market. Basing your 3-dimensional SEO on the Google keywords tool is a formula for failure.

Start using Quantcast, Compete, and Alexa services to analyze search engines. Ignore the number of estimated visits. Focus on when their peak periods are, who uses them, and what age/ethnic/income groups those search engines are popular with. If you can focus more of your content toward those groups you haven’t been serving, you should improve your referrals from the “weaker” search engines.

Use multiple tracking methods - Everyone has a favorite search metrics tool. All of them suck and none of them are any better than the others. Get your head out of Google Analytics and start learning some other tracking tools. Especially learn how to analyze server log files. You’ll learn more by using multiple metrics tools than by using one.

Pay special attention to long tail queries. Group them together so you can identify new query spaces that you have not previously optimized for. Break out your search referral data by search engine. And understand that Google Analytics does not accurately track search traffic. If you don’t get the real data from another source, you’re killing yourself.

Add site search from your weakest search engine - People use site search as a secondary navigational tool — on many sites (especially large content sites), people turn to site search first. If your site includes a lot of content in blog or forum posts the built-in search tools are completely inadequate. So put that third- or fourth-ranked search engine that constantly crawls your site to work and use it as a site search tool. Make the tool highly visible and easy to get to. Your referrals from Mr. 4th Place will increase dramatically overnight — literally overnight (unless you’ve foolishly prevented the search engine from indexing your content — many SEOs do make that mistake).

Use weaker search engines to feature query results in your copy - We all occasionally find the need to illustrate a point with search queries. The problem is that when you use the most heavily congested search results to illustrate a point, your point eventually becomes lost in the competitive shuffle. Make it a habit to include example queries in all your copy for your weaker search engines. Show people how visible your content is in search results that are favorable to you. If you’re concerned that they don’t look real because they lack advertising, buy some ads for those queries. The cost should be minimal until your competitors show up.

Leverage your microsites to help weaker search engines - I am not saying you should build microsites to strengthen other search engines. I am saying that — if you are already using microsites for valid marketing purposes — leverage them. Use alternative search engines as site search for the microsites. Embed links to queries on the weaker search engines that favor your content on the microsites. Use your microsites to openly endorse the weaker search engines. Teach people to use other search tools.

You can also leverage microsites by using them to focus on the different search markets. Optimizing a specific microsite for a specific search engine is okay provided you offer unique, relevant content. That is, don’t fall into the doorway site trap and just try to tweak your keywords for each search engine on engine-specific sites. Your microsites should be targeting audiences, not search engines.

In your offline marketing, wherever legal and appropriate, tell people they can use any search engine to find your brand. Your site should rank for your brand on all the major search engines. Mention all the search engines by name. Rotate them in your dialogue until you become comfortable naming any of the major search engines. Do this in your press releases, any interviews you give, any podcasts or broadcasts you participate in, any speeches you give, etc.

If you’re not seeing much traffic from search engines other than Google it’s not because they don’t send traffic to Web sites, it’s because you’re not optimizing for their search results. You have no idea of what you’ve been missing out on until you do it right. When you see that traffic come in, then you’ll understand that, yes, Virginia, there really are other search engines out there.

Last year I wrote how to write an SEO plan and mentioned the SEO Strategy Document without going into very much detail. Shimon Sandler actually shared an example of an SEO Strategy Document in late 2007.

His document is structured as a client campaign proposal, serving multiple purposes. A simpler SEO Strategy Document would serve many people’s interests better, in my opinion. So here is an alternative format that you may find helpful.

1. Needs Assessment
2. Strategy Goals
3. Strategic Resources
4. Strategic Tasks
5. Dependencies
6. Order of Execution
7. Metrics

I disagree with the inclusion of timelines in strategic documents. You use timelines in project management, not in search engine strategies. A good strategist can guestimate — based on historical performance — what lag times may be expected, but you cannot hold a strategy to timelines because the search engines don’t care about your timelines.

Aside:When pressed for timelines I look at what is happening in the search indexes and what I think will happen in the search indexes over the next 3 to 6 weeks. Based on historical trends (and/or other information I have acquired) I estimate how much lag time may be required for results to take place. There are certain times of the year when people just want to shoot me because I won’t commit to 2 week timelines. But I’ve never regretted factoring lag times into my estimates. The bottom line is: You cannot plot search engine strategies against timelines. That just doesn’t work.

Now let’s get down to brass tacks. First, let me state that an SEO strategy should NOT attempt to be comprehensive. It’s a strategy, not a campaign plan. The difference between a campaign plan and a strategy is that the campaign plan DOES have to meet a timeline. You can implement multiple strategies and change strategies in the midst of a campaign but if you try to run two or more campaigns for the same sites you’re just competing against yourself. In the military that’s called a CLUSTERF***. The “cluster” part means some officer who didn’t know what he was doing overrode what the trained/experienced NCOs knew had to be done — in the business world we call this “Executive Fiat” — aka “formula for disaster” and “guaranteed failure”.

You cannot successfully execute an efficient SEO campaign through Executive Fiat, and you tend to burn out people when you draw upon it. That was a hard lesson I learned from both sides in the IT industry, but it applies just as well in the SEO industry.

Needs Assessment - You have to explain what the strategy is addressing. What need is being handled? What problem is being resolved? For example, “The site example.com has lost rankings in 15 keywords and search traffic has declined by 15%. We need to recover that 15% traffic.” BANG! That’s it! That’s your needs assessment. You can expand with details but you cannot add need upon need upon need. If you have multiple needs you need multiple strategies.

Strategy Goals (Objectives) - What will executing the strategy (hopefully) accomplish toward meeting the need? Will it rebuild 5 of the 15 lost rankings? All of them? Will it simply reposition the site to do something else (to offset the lost search traffic)? If you include any dates or time references in this part of your document, you’re doing it wrong. If someone wants a timeline, write it separately from the strategy document. In most cases, people really want to know when the magic will be complete. They could care less about what day and hour you execute any part of the strategy.

Strategic Resources - This can include money if you’re going to pay for resources but it needs to include intangible resources as well. Do you have other Web sites you’re going to incorporate in the strategy? How many man-hours can you commit to the strategy? What tools will you use? What expertise or special elements will be incorporated? It’s best to know up front what tools you intend to work with rather than wait until you get into the thick of the strategy execution to figure out all that stuff.

Strategic Tasks - Here are a few examples of strategic tasks:

• Redesign meta tags
• Write new copy that emphasizes (topic)
• Place links on (specific list of Web sites)

Strategic task lists don’t include specifications for anchor text, link placement, font sizes, keywords, etc. If a task requires that kind of detailed planning, write a detailed plan for the task. This part of your strategy document is just a TASK LIST.

Dependencies - No SEO strategy completely survives contact with the search engines. In the military they say, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy”. Knowing what your dependencies are helps you build a flexible strategy. What do you do if one of your dependencies fails? This list of dependencies is where you include annotations suggesting plan B options and (if you need that much redundancy) plan C options. Don’t flesh out the plan B and C options — just mention them. Later on you can give them more thought if you need to. Otherwise, don’t waste your time figuring out solutions you don’t need.

Order of Execution - What needs to be done first? What can wait until last? This is as close as you get to actual project management. Again, DO NOT INCLUDE A TIMELINE. If you need a timeline, that is a SEPARATE DOCUMENT. The order of execution has to take into consideration when resources will be available, lag times (such as build-to-crawl, crawl-to-index, index-to-confirmed-value, etc.), communication requirements, etc. Just organize your task list in such a way that you can annotate it with comments like “This needs to be done AFTER such-and-such” or “This should be completed before so-and-so” or “Can be implemented on an ongoing basis”, etc. Think of the Order of Execution section as that part of the strategy that describes the nature of each strategic task and how it relates to other tasks. It is NOT a timeline. You can create a timeline after you have the Order of Execution laid out.

Metrics - How do you measure stages of completion, success, and failure? You should easily be able to list or describe what you’ll do to gauge the strategy’s progress. At some point you may have to conclude that this strategy won’t work (it won’t accomplish the stated goals). The sooner you can figure that out, the better. Ideally, you want to only choose a strategy that has a high probability of working, but no strategy works every time.

And you’re done….

Search engine optimization can be executed as a mechanical process. Spammers do that every day. But real search engine optimization has to look at so many different parts of the picture that you need to break it down into manageable functions and tasks. An SEO strategy is not a campaign plan. You can write a campaign plan but you probably will find yourself diverging from it a hundred different ways.

The simpler the goals, the less competitive the queries, the easier the tasks, the more predictable and mechanical everything becomes. Some people do this stuff off the top of their heads. They have basic routines they fall into and they only change what they are doing when it doesn’t work. That’s a very pragmatic approach to any job. It gets easier with experience.

If you’re not yet in that position then you would probably benefit from writing down your strategies. You can analyze their effectiveness much, much better by holding each strategy accountable for its results. Organizing your thoughts this way will help you learn some of the more advanced aspects of SEO much, much faster than trying to do it all in your head.

You see this question pop up in many forums. It’s usually posted by someone working on a new site. “Why does google ignore my site?” may come from someone who has never created a Web site before or someone who hasn’t created a site in a very long time.

In the old days all you had to do was build a site and submit it to search engines. But the search engines that were responsive to direct submission have all vanished or changed their technologies. The rules of submission have changed.

Many people seem to only use the obsolete “ADD YOUR URL” pages that Google and Yahoo! still provide. I haven’t seen either search engine act on a direct submission in years. I have not tested BING’s submission page.

Very often a major search engine will crawl your new site several times without indexing it. The are aware of your site but they have filters and tests they use to determine whether your site may be a spam site. Think of these tests as credibility tests.

The first credibility test may consist of nothing more than a quick check to see if you’re doing anything that violates search engine guidelines. Merely passing this test does not ensure the search engine will include your site in its index. All it does is ensure your site won’t be banned before it gets indexed.

The second credibility test may consist of little more than a quick count of inbound link references. It doesn’t have to mean anything but if a new site is already capturing links it could mean either there is some compelling content on the site or that it has some promotional backing behind. Promotional links don’t mean the site is spammy, but a LOT of promotional links might look suspicious.

If your new site doesn’t have any inbound links then search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Ask may wait before adding it to their index. They all maintain at least two Web indexes and several of the major search engines have been known to show sites from their secondary indexes (Ask appears to NOT show results from its secondary index).

If Google seems to be ignoring your new site and you’re doing nothing wrong, the most likely reason is that you just don’t have any inbound links to validate your site. But before you rush out to create social media profiles to get some quick links, think about where you can get truly credible, authenticating links. Maybe (if your site is a commercial site) you want to buy some listings in major business directories. Be sure they don’t use “rel=’nofollow’” on their links, however.

Once you start getting links to your site you have to wait for the search engines to recrawl AND reindex those pages. Recrawling may take up to 2 months. Reindexing may take another 1-2 weeks. Getting links from pages that are recached frequently is better than getting links from pages that are only occasionally recached. But just because a page has a high recache rate doesn’t mean its links will pass value. If the page has been identified by the search engines as a link seller, it may never pass any value.

To be credible, a link has to come from a reliable site (a site that the search engines trust); the link should be (in my opinion) embedded in content that is topically related to the topic of your content; and the link anchor text should agree with copy on your page. Will a search engine allow links to pass value if they don’t meet these three criteria? Yes. However, you’re more likely to have credible links if they comply with this minimal standard.

If you have credible links and you’re sure the search engine has found them, but your site still does not appear in search results, there may be technical issues you have to resolve. You should have built a checklist of technical things (robots.txt, consistent internal URL structure, appropriate meta tag content, etc.) when you launched your site. Go back over your checklist. You might have left a block in place that prevents the engines from indexing your site.

Google will ignore your site if you tell it to. So will Ask, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. You can tell a search engine to ignore your site with the Disallow directive in robots.txt, by breaking your internal links (clicking on them will tell you if they are broken), by using the wrong kind of links (e.g., image maps, flash links, links in floating navigation bars, etc.), and with the “noindex,noarchive” options in robots meta tags. You can either use the generic “robots” or name specific search engines like “slurp” (for Yahoo!), Google, “teoma” (for Ask), and “msnbot” (for Microsoft).

Using “rel=’nofollow’” on internal links will also prevent search engines from fully crawling and indexing your site.

Generally speaking, I have noticed that search engines are less likely to show 1-page sites than they are to show 100-page sites. That’s not a hard-and-fast rule as with enough inbound links you can get a 1-page site to appear in the index. But the more content pages you have a site, the more your own internal linking can help validate your site. Good site structure and robust site content help tremendously with indexing because every page a search engine dissects will add links to the search engine’s crawl queue.

You can also use sitemaps to help get your pages crawled and indexed faster. There are four types of sitemaps you can create for your Web site.

1. HTML Sitemap - This is for your visitors and can be broken up into multiple pages, but search engines love HTML sitemaps.
2. XML Sitemap - This is only for search engines and you can have up to 50,000 on your site.
3. XML Sitemap Index - Basically a listing in XML format of all your XML sitemaps. You can have up to 50,000 of these, too (but that doesn’t mean you should hope you’ll get 250,000,000 XML sitemaps crawled).
4. TXT sitemaps - These are alternative formats that provided limited value but they work for sites that don’t have the ability to create or host XML sitemaps.

You can include links to your XML and TXT sitemaps in your “robots.txt” file. Doing this helps speed up the crawling process a little bit but the fastest way to get a site crawled is to authenticate/register the site with a search engine’s Webmaster console (Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft all offer this option) and submitting the sitemap there. A couple of search engines (Ask and BING) allow you to directly ping their sitemap crawlers.

Simply getting crawled doesn’t ensure you’ll be indexed, but if you have a couple hundred pages on your site you should see at least some of them appear in the US search results within about 2 weeks for US search engines. I’ve noticed that non-US top-level domains may take up to 2 months to appear in the US search engines regardless of how many links point to them (except for sites that draw hundreds or thousands of links from diverse resources naturally). I cannot explain the apparent bias against non-US top-level domains in US search but I don’t consider it to be anything people should worry about.

Once your site appears in the search index you should start testing its search visibility. That means you should start looking for page titles from your site. If they don’t appear in the search results (or if they are buried way down past the first page) that probably means one of two things: 1) you’re targeting competitive keywords OR 2) you’re stuck in the Supplemental Results Index.

You have to be patient. It may take up to a month after your site first appears in the search index before it reaches that equilibrium point where its rankings will hover. A normal site’s rankings per page fluctuate up to 5 positions over the course of a week. Your pages can go up and they can go down. Checking your rankings more frequently than once a week will drive you insane with needless worry.

If you’re trying to invade a competitive query you probably will need some links, but don’t go on a link-building binge. Instead, develop a linking strategy that doesn’t obsess over search results. Every link that sends you direct traffic makes you less dependent upon search engines. A happy Webmaster could care less about why Google ignores his site.

Two years ago I wrote The Relevant Link Myth on SEO Theory. The point of the article could probably be summed up by this paragraph:

The idea that a link may carry greater weight from a page that is devoted to the same topic as the destination page is another bit of nonsense that SEOs have adopted. How many of you would turn down a link from the front page of Yahoo!? I see no hands. Apparently, relevance isn’t all that it has been cooked up to be after all.

Today Rand Fishkin wrote an interesting post on SEOmoz, asking if it’s time to revisit themed links. I voted in the poll attached to the article and I picked “Yes. Theme-ing of external links is an important relevance/ranking element.”

Further on in the comments, I agreed with Russ Virante, who said: “Getting a themed link is not enough. Getting a link from a site that ranks for your primary term is.”

In my reply to Russ, I wrote: “I agree with Russ. I feel there is some sort of credibility aspect to Google’s link analysis. They seem to know when a link is off-topic and on-topic. Probably that’s a result of their pursuit of paid links.”

So, it’s logical to ask — am I trying to have it both ways or have I changed my mind?

A lot can happen in two years and I think you have to look at the circumstances behind the issue. Technically, what I wrote two years ago is still valid from the theoretical perspective. A link is a link is a link, as Jill Whalen likes to say. But not all links are the same, as most of us now recognize. Google has been trying to prove that PageRank is really a good idea (it remains the most stupid idea in search engine technology history).

We in the Web publishing community have to live with PageRank for as long as we care about Google, and for as long as Google cares enough about PageRank to try to make it work. That means that Google is doing everything it can to qualify links. Google wants to prevent links (that Google doesn’t like) from passing value and it wants to reward links (that Google likes) by allowing them to pass value.

You and I have no way of knowing which links work and which links are a waste of time. Unless you’re a link spammer with a horde of low-budget link placers or scripts running across a network of IP addresses, you cannot afford to rely upon the shot gun effect. You have to build your links with as much precision as possible.

That means you need to do a better job of qualifying where you get your links from than ever before because if you’re relying on links to build your search engine rankings (you should not be but probably are) then you need links that pass value.

The safest approach to precision link building is to find credible linking resources — and that means they should be topically related to whatever they link to. You don’t necessarily have to get a horse page to link to your horse page, but you should get your horse links from copy that is relevant to your horse copy.

The search engines are not perfect. They are mechanical, algorithmic, and lack the subtlety of human emotion, judgment, and experience. Nonetheless, they are improving their abilities to associate content with content. The search engines work with synonyms, homynyms, and topics in a growing number of ways. You can adjust your relevance guage a little bit to allow for some non-keyword specific placements.

I just feel that you really want to focus on credible linking resources. Following the old rules of thumb about relevant linking, themed linking will set you on the path toward working with credible linking resources. They won’t take you all the way, but you need to start somewhere and the relevant link myth is an easy starting point for many people.

I still say that Google would reward a link placed on the front page of Yahoo!, CNN, or WhiteHouse.gov because, frankly, such links would really have to be earned. They would be EXTREMELY credible. The anchor text would make them relevant as always but in today’s search engine environment I don’t think relevance is as critical as credibility.

Call it algorithmic credibility but we’re really being forced to look for links from credible resources in credible placements. Maybe last year’s quick link drop methods still work but why bet on that approach in the long run?

Now would be a good time to adjust your selection criteria for link placements.