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I think one of the largest unsettled questions in the SEO industry is concerned with how to measure link building. It’s not an easy question to answer because, frankly, there is no one right answer. Everyone has their own idea of what is important in the SEO process. Link building is usually deemed to be one of the most important parts of the process but reporting is not always part of the plan.

First of all, there is more than one kind of link building. Some people build links only to get new sites crawled and indexed, allowing nature to take its course. If you consistently publish good content that’s really about all the link building you need to do.

Some people build links to improve search results rankings. This is, of course, one of the least efficient ways to build SEO success but it’s the simplest concept in the business and a lot of people look no further than that (although, to be fair to the industry, most SEOs probably devote far more time and effort to other SEO processes than they realize — thus subconsciously weighting link building more than they should).

Some people build links because they are under pressure to do so. You know the link building is not necessary but someone wants to see some movement (people scurrying about the decks, so to speak). A great deal of the SEO process involves waiting. Clients and executives don’t like to wait. They think you can force the process if you take immediate action now, which is of course absolutely ridiculous in most SEO situations.

The Searchable Web Ecosystem just doesn’t work that way — not even in the era of Real Time Search.

So, still, people want to know more about how to report on link building. It’s an important question because we have to be accountable for the work we do. I’ve had to report on link building in many different ways.

Some clients just don’t care because all they look at are the search results and (hopefully) their conversions. These are easy clients to build links for but they are probably putting themselves at greater risk of being abused by unscrupulous link building practices.

Some clients just want the numbers, with the understanding that if they feel something is amiss they expect immediate disclosure of the details behind the numbers. I like these clients best because they are making me responsible for my work but trusting me to just give them the core information without getting bogged down in the details.

And some clients want to know everything. These are not bad clients, they are simply detail-oriented clients. I was recently asked on the HighRankings Forums how I report links to clients (and that sort of inspired this article). I mentioned that for these types of clients we’ve provided spreadsheets showing link locations.

You know, I’ve often advised people in the industry to NOT share their resources — but there is a difference between wasting your hard-found linking resources on a blog post and building a stronger relationship with a client. Clients can be very touchy if you try to be coy about your links.

Some clients just don’t understand search engine optimization. They can be a challenge to work with if they feel like they need to be asking questions but as long as you build patience into your client relationship you should be able to reach a mutual understanding with them. I’ve never denied being responsible for a link I had placed for a client.

Some clients know enough about search engine optimization that they want to make sure you don’t do anything sneaky or unethical. They don’t necessarily HAVE to know where all the links are, but they want to know they can audit your work for their own accountability.

So I think you have to be consistent in how your manage your link data. Don’t do it just on a client-by-client basis. Do it for all clients, do it consistently as much as possible. Using the same data tracking and reporting methodology for everyone makes it easier to handle sudden changes in client demands for accountability.

Our working philosophy has been that a client might at some point demand a full audit. In fact, this happened (under welcome circumstances, so please don’t read anything into my admission). We were able to collect and report on a lot of link data pretty quickly.

I like to provide detail-oriented clients with spreadsheets — and probably most everyone wants that. Spreadsheets allow for easy annotation and sorting. There was a time when I provided link detail reports in word processing documents and I don’t ever want to go back to that. Spreadsheets or comma/tab-separated files offer the best reporting formats.

Clients do sometimes object to specific links. You as an SEO might feel like they are perfectly good links but for whatever reason the client doesn’t want the links. We remove such links immediately without argument or attempt at justification. Links are much, much easier to replace than client trust. In a very few rare situations I’ve found myself with links that were not so easy to remove. I don’t like dealing with those kinds of linking resources if only because I want to keep the clients happy.

Of course, there are other aspects to measuring link building. After all raw link counts don’t really tell you anything except that someone placed X number of links (maybe with Y anchor texts) on such-and-such sites.

The difference between effective link building and busy work is a significant change in the search environment. But what do you do about highly competitive queries where, say, 1 month’s worth of link building doesn’t necessarily accomplish much?

I had a client call me up once and ask if I was responsible for the sudden surge in links he saw for his corporate site. “How many links?” I asked, thinking he might have seen our full quota for the week by some miraculous coincidence of software.

“About 1 million,” he replied coolly.

One…million…links. Yeah. Right. I can take those down overnight.

Seriously, I would never place 1 million links in a week or a month. That is just insane. I know some people do it but not me. I’m not interested in that kind of SEO.

I know people who have built millions of links, millions of content pages at a time. I respect their skills. I just don’t use those tactics. And I seriously doubt such people really report those links in detail. What Fortune 1000 company would want that kind of information in its email system? Maybe there are some big public companies that don’t care about stuff like that — but I don’t know any of them.

Link value is really not easy to measure, especially when you don’t have the luxury of using unique anchor text to track which links add value to a destination in the search results.

But if you have access to referrer data you can show links that send traffic to specific destinations.

If you have any ability, even though it might only be to subscribe to search engine alerts, to track Website mentions in the blogosphere, that can help you show how effective your blog link placements may be. “I saw this link on such-and-such” happens.

If your client values Toolbar PageRank and you’ve allowed them to box you into the corner of tracking Toolbar PR you’ll be sitting jittery every 3 months or so when Google updates its TBPR data. I don’t tie my reporting to Toolbar PR data, however. It’s not a reliable indicator of value.

Another good measure of link building would be search visibility — how many new pages are being indexed since the link building began, as opposed to how many new pages were being indexed before the link building began. You have to compare trends to trends, not numbers to numbers. Think of a trend as a vector (a series of numbers).

All of these things contribute to showing clients (or management) they are getting value for their investment. The more information you provide the better. Often enough people have too narrow a picture (at first) and they ask for too little or unhelpful reporting. If you can tie the link building to other metrics you’ll provide better value.

Your ultimate goal is twofold: first, to use the link building measurements to improve your own link building; you want to be the first person to know that what you’re doing doesn’t work, not the last. Second, you want to be able to show the return on the investment. That return can change over time. A link placed today may be worth more to you in a year than in a month, and not simply because it’s a year older.

Measuring your link building adds work to your burden as an SEO but in my opinion an ethical SEO technician cannot hide anything from the client. You have to be accountable for the work you do and what you bill for. If you’re ashamed or afraid to disclose your links to your client (or management), you’re probably doing it wrong.

Link building doesn’t have to be completely transparent — in fact, the more transparent you make the process the more you risk being micromanaged by someone who knows less about link building than you do. Reporting and measuring are really two different functions. You SHOULD be measuring your link building regardless of how much you report. And you SHOULD be ready to report everything if you find yourself with the need to do so.

There is intrinsic, tangible value in the measurement itself.