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I’m going to quote myself from a discussion that occurred on the LED Digest in January 2007. I made a point there about how people can improve their linking that I have reiterated several times in different ways. I stumbled across the archive for the original post while looking for something else and thought it was worth repeating, in part, here on Best SEO Blog.

My reason is simple: over the past few weeks a growing number of people have reported lost listings in Google. They all claim their sites are 2 to 4 years old, they’ve been studiously “building links” for those sites, and they have no idea of why their rankings might suddenly disappear. This all sounds so very familiar to me. I’ve seen the pattern many times before.

Begin Citation – Michael Martinez discussing “Google linking” in LED Digest 2322

I’ve spent the past few weeks browsing complaint threads in forums and discussion groups. There are many, many, MANY Webmasters who have lost listings in Google, whose pages are now showing as Supplemental Results, who are confused and angry because they have lost traffic.

The other day I finally saw an opportunity to ask Matt Cutts for as definitive an answer as I felt he could give on what’s happening. He has been reluctant to speak at the level of detail people want him to. I asked one of the most convoluted questions of my career, giving him virtually no room for a graceful exit. Matt doesn’t lie, but he won’t answer a tough question if it’s chasing the algorithm and he can avoid doing so.

Matt Cutts’ search statistics for 2006

Here is his answer (his reference to “PageRank” is to INTERNAL PageRank — not what you see in the Toolbar):

Michael Martinez, I can try to talk more about things like supplemental more. Usually it’s not because I’m trying to sidestep, but because I’ve said the high-order bits already. For example, the main thing that determines presence in the supplemental index is PageRank. Not enough links for a page to make it into the regular web index? Then it’s likely to be an issue of not enough PageRank to that page. The page used to do well and now it’s in the supplemental results? It could be that links that previously counted aren’t as trusted anymore. For example, if someone’s doing a co-op link exchange, or buying links, or reciprocal linking to excess, that’s the sort of thing where those links might not be counting as much as they used to.

What is “reciprocal linking to excess”? I don’t expect him to say, but I would say that if all your links are reciprocals, that’s “to excess”. They have found ways to filter a LOT of links. There are many, many angry and frustrated Webmasters now.

For weeks I’ve been telling people to get more links from the Main Index and that should help them get their pages out of the Supplemental Index. You should not need many such links. Maybe 3-5. Several other SEOs have spoken up in support of the low number.

For those of you who are not operating ring-tones affiliate pages, but who instead sell golf clubs, I would say you should be able to get some good links.

In my opinion, however, I don’t think you’ll get them from the ring-tones affiliate pages.

Everyone wants to know how to get those valuable links. What I’ve been trying to explain to people is that first you have to know which links really CAN pass value. They will be the links that are hard to get. Think about who you would link to if you absolutely knew that linking to the wrong people would cause you to lose rankings.

I mean, exaggerate, in your mind, to the point of absurdity, what the consequences of linking out undesirably would be. Under those circumstances, who would you link to? Don’t think in terms of Yahoo!, CNN, and Whitehouse.gov. Think in terms of, “Well, my cousin Greg has a great guitar site but my friend George’s ring-tones affiliate store is just going to have to live without my link.”

Your site should be every bit as trustworthy and linkworthy as the kind of sites you would recommend to anyone who would make your life miserable if you didn’t give them your best, most honest recommendation. You don’t have to be Picasso. You should be a legitimate artist offering your best work possible.

That is the standard that tells you where to seek links.

But what I tell people — what I have done for years — is that I link out freely without asking for reciprocation. In my opinion, if you do that enough, exercising good sense in your selections, other people will link to your site because it’s a useful resource.

You may need to buy some PPC ads just to bring in some visitors. But if you convert them into your supporters, they will help you. Give them a reason to become your advocates. Make their experience on your site a great one.

Then you don’t have to worry about whether you’re tripping link filters.
End Citation

Let me add something here, as that discussion took place in a context dealing with the value of what are now known as “thin affiliate sites”. I believe that over the nearly three years since I wrote the above comments Google has managed to devise even more ways of filtering links. For example, I doubt your average blogroll and footer links work the way most people think they should any more — at least not in Google’s index.

Of course, through 2007 and much of 2008 there was a huge shift in the SEO community to grabbing links from social media networks — a practice I openly criticized. Now many SEOs have learned the hard way that their links have been nofollowed, thus rendering them useless for off-page search optimization in Google (but they may still send you some traffic — you never know). Note: I don’t mean for anyone to confuse link building through social media with social media marketing, which is a different matter altogether.

In 2007 the PageRank Sculpting myth took off, thanks in large part to people overinterpreting Matt Cutts’ position on the use of “rel=’nofollow’” on internal links and putting words into his mouth. In 2008 Google changed the way it handled implied (nofollowed) PageRank because people were screwing up their Web sites. The SEO community, of course, blindly continued to “test” its PageRank Sculpting methods and reported heartfelt success long after Google diluted the amount of PageRank they could channel.

Now in late 2009 the heart of the classic link purchasing community is starting to collapse under the weight of its own fear of losing clients. Buying links has become “too risky” for some SEOs, although others still defend the practice. We are probably witnessing the passing of an era of open link manipulation. That doesn’t mean link manipulation is going away.

No, more likely we’re probably going to see an explosion of sneaky linking tactics like the use of PageRank Traps (I first openly discussed PageRank Trapping in September 2007).

The SEO community is more desperate for value-passing links now than ever before. There are certainly alternatives to sneaky link building. For example, you can still join one of several subscription blog networks. I’m not talking about your Grandpa’s 2006 Blog Networks (those sites should have been called Blog Hosting Services). I’m talking about real networks of blogs, hundreds or thousand of them, that you can post your original content to.

Subscription Blog Networks (which I have described as “subscription article distribution services”) are different from free article distribution services in several ways. For one thing, the point of the blogging is to embed links in unique content; the free article services are inviting other sites to copy your content.

Some people have apparently confused the Subscription Blog Networks with blog farms. Blog farms are a nasty piece of work. The blog farms are created via software sold through the Black Hat SEO community channels (and openly on the Web). They usually populate their blogs with RSS feeds (Syndic8t publishes a huge list of overspammed feeds, and pretty much all the major SEO blogs are included in the list). Blog farms look nothing like Subscription Blog Networks. Unlike link farms blog farms don’t have to link all the sites together, but sometimes the blog farmers do engage in tight or heavy interlinkage.

You can still obtain good links by asking for them. People think I am dead set against this practice. Not exactly. What I am dead set against is people asking ME for links. I’m not very likely to give you the links you want. That’s just me.

But asking for links is also inefficient. If you’re not doing good research and prequalifying your link resources, you’re probably sending out a lot more email than gets answered. Worse, you probably have a low hit rate on the link requests. If that’s the way you want to spend your time, make sure someone is paying you well to do that.

You can also obtain good links from free article distribution and press releases — but those links are not guaranteed and you should not assume you’ll get them. I would say the odds of getting good links from those channels today are considerably less than they were 4 years ago when most people still were not using them.

You can still obtain good links from a few Web directories. Plenty of people have reservations about submitting to directories, and it’s admittedly not very efficient. But you can still get good links from Web directories.

Even passive link reciprocation still works pretty well. I’m not convinced that active link reciprocation still helps much with search engine rankings but I suppose some people might be succeeding. Passive link reciprocation occurs naturally without exchanges of emails. You see someone is linking to you so you link to them. Someone else sees you’re linking to them so they link back.

Some bloggers still use pingbacks to capture links from other blogs. Pingback spam is probably not paying off much these days but I am sure there are some hardcore pingbackers in the SEO community.

Comment blog spam is alive and well, too. It doesn’t get you many value-passing links, and every time some idiot publishes a list of “dofollow” blogs the number of available dofollow blogs shrinks.

My point in recapping all these linking techniques is to show that in less than three years the SEO community has managed to screw itself out of some pretty cool link manipulation techniques. The “A List” SEO bloggers so many people love to follow no longer openly share their best ideas — they’ve learned the hard way what I’ve been telling people for years: it’s easier to burn out a good idea than it is to find the next one. So now everyone is telling everyone else to keep their mouths shut.

I don’t entirely agree with that approach. What I tell people is not to share all their knowledge openly. Once you do that you have no advantage left. You cannot really compete like that — not in this industry where we have only three real secrets: which techniques you use, which resources you use, and who your clients are.

But there are some things that bear repeating. You should not be telling people where to find dofollow links but you SHOULD be talking about how you decide to link out to other sites. That is where we can help each other. Letting people know what you’ll link to and why may help some scammers but if you exercise due diligence before granting a link, you’ll save yourself some grief and embarrassment.

When the dust settles and you once again see the SEO community caught with its pants down, you can repair your dignity quickly by reminding yourself that you already know the best linking expert available: yourself. Understanding who you will link to and why will help you find links from good sites.

After all, even blog farm spammers won’t link to their competitors unless they think they’ll gain more from the exchange than their competitors do. When it comes to what we link to, rather than where we obtain links from, we’re nearly all extremely picky and demanding. You don’t need to look any farther than your own site to learn how to obtain links. You’ll never get a better link than the link you give to someone else. You’ll never give a better link than you feel anyone deserves.

In today’s Web, links form connections and convey trust. You know how to build connections and you know how people should earn your trust. That’s really all you need to know about linking.

The rest is up to you.