All I can suggest is you search on those terms (understanding you’ll only just find the tip of the ice berg). The in-depth debates happened all over the place, although mostly long ago.

The few in-depth debates. If there’s any public place you know off hand where this took place in the past, would love to hear it.

Thanks very much for your other very good advice. That’s a good strategy and I had not thought of reciprocal linking in that sense. For us no problem, NONE of our outbound links are actually reciprocal. We just link to where the best place is and we received links from others on that same basis and they hardly ever coincide.

I understand the whole hub-spoke model both internally and externally and this reciprical way of linking may actually be perfect for that model..

I think you’re referring to TruReputation Score, which is a tool to measure sentiment in the search results. We feel (after several years of managing search reputation results for clients) that it provides a better picture of the impact of negative content in the search results than other metrics. Not everyone has an inflamed search reputation, of course.

I’m not sure of what you’re referring to with respect to advanced discussions. Are you referring to something I said in the comments for the SEO Theory article about whether Black Hat SEO is more advanced than White Hat SEO?

Not every discussion I’ve had with people about SEO is to be found on forums and blogs. I’ve had plenty of discussions via email and in person (or on the phone).

As far as link building goes, I wouldn’t say you’re rambling, but to me the arena only seems larger in some ways and smaller in others. Most new non-commercial sites are probably coming out as blogs, so maybe it would make sense to befriend amateur bloggers and then link to the posts that feature your sites.

Is that reciprocal linking? Yes. Is it accepted? As far as I know it is.

Search engines don’t care if you link to 100 sites that happen to write articles about you. They do care, however, if you only link to sites that write articles about you. A reasonable person (and search engine) would ask, why are all the outbound links on this site only pointing to articles that link back?

Strangely enough, and I remember you were not in agreement with this, but correct me if I’m wrong, we noticed that it was more the overal strength of our domain that helped since several pages, without having external links still outperformed links from domains such as newspapers or museums.

I guess to now find the right links on a page-by-page basis is going to be extremely cumbersome: and what’s the long term effect? Links from bloggers disappear in archives, thus the value (often) disappears with it. Same with many social media beside the rel=nofollow issue.

If you look elsewhere, outside social media… what websites still have value that are not commercial websites? Like from individuals, or organizations or institutes..and what about the page they’d link from to you, most likely some old fashioned guy who says: “we have a link page”… eh.. forget aboutit.

So it’s a totally different arena then say 2-3 years ago.. or am I just rambling ?

After half a year or so I returend to your SEO_theory and read about truereputation and now I see you here.

I tried true reputation and while useful it didn’t bring me that much news, as I kind of knew what the outcome was, considering what I had put in. Maybe it helped there were no negatives so the answer was obvious from the outset.

I liked your posting and you may remember our website it has a lot of content in it. I know all the basics of on-page optimization and sometimes it even worked, sometimes it didn’t. I don’t expect you to tell all secrets of the trade but you mentioned some advanced discussions. If you could point me in the right direction that would be very much appreciated.

And.. thanks to your advice we NEVER sculpted or rel=no followed internal links, nor external links (since they’re editorialized anyway and we are not in the business of hoarding PR) and I am glad, form what I read, we haven’t. SO thanks so much for your dire warnings.

Another thing we did was create a much better internal linking structure and lord and behold, whenever we produce a new article and link it from somewhere, doesn’t even matter that much, then within a week it’s in Google, often faster and it ranks quite well after a little while (apart from the first week bump google gives you).

So.. I wanted to say with this is that although half the time I was struggling to understand what you were saying, I guess the other half was already good enough to have a visible effect applying your logic with our logic to our site, if you know what I mean.

I think the Next Big Thing may be another Very Bad Thing, as the people who gave us PageRank hoarding and PageRank sculpting seem reluctant to let it go.

So let me propose the name PageRank Leeching for low-life scum incompetent SEOs who don’t know how to make do with what they have.

I think it’s a good thing for the web that focus is coming back to content. (Good for me too since it’s my blogs focus )