Best SEO Blog|Launch your site.

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).