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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).

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 Jones of 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.

Rand Fishkin’s Whiteboard Friday on Embedded Content and Linking video this week took me back a few years. I have used that distributed content concept for a long time to build out my personal backlink network.

In a nutshell, you publish content on your site that people can embed on their sites. By giving people permission to embed part of your content on their sites, you can expect a link back to your site (a 1-way link, usually). Some people have managed to turn this technique into a spectacular failure. Other people have used it to earn billions of dollars.

But Rand pointed out that it requires work to create these types of content. True. And it’s a maintenance hassle. I’m still fixing scripts for one widget I created about 8 years ago. Every now and then someone hacks it, I move servers and break it, or something changes somewhere in the universe and the gods and pseudo-gods go crazy.

Still, you get a lot of links from these types of widgets and they can be easy to produce with today’s technology. Here are a few suggestions, followed by a few suggested guidelines.

Search box – Do you have a lot of content on your site? Do you have a deep database? Even if you’re charging for access you can distribute a search box widget to other sites and let people see what you have. Search box widgets work best when backed by good indexing tools, so be careful how you set this up.

RSS Feed – It’s been done a thousand times and the SEO community seems to fall in and out of love with this idea. Nonetheless, it works when you do it right. First, you need to create frequent, high-quality content that people want to read (link lists rarely make the cut). Second, you need to make it easy for people to embed your headlines on their site. Third, your content needs to be relevant to other people’s visitors so that they feel adding your headlines to their content increases the value of their site.

Image Rotator – Do people steal your bandwidth by hotlinking to your images? You have two choices and I’ve tried both. First, you can block all hotlinking (which I currently do). Second, you can allow people to embed a widget on their sites that rotates thumbnail images from your archive. I got good traffic and referrals (and links) from such a widget but keeping it updated was a nightmare for me because I’m neither a photographer nor a graphic artist. Still, if your business has an endless supply of images, make them available to other Web sites in a diminished value format and you may find you solve two or more problems with one technique.

Mutual Advertising Widget – You don’t have to join a large network to get advertising. You can band together with like-minded (or unlike-minded) Webmasters to share advertising. There are plenty of free and low-cost banner network scripts out there. By serving targeted advertising to a niche community you’ll find that passionate visitors click on the ads. It only needs one person to step forward and take on the bandwidth and administration responsibility. Niche networks can handle 100-200 sites. The network administrator gets a free link on every site. And you don’t have to use just banner ads — you can create text ads, flash ads, video ads, etc.

Video Channel – I know YouTube allows you to do this. You set up a video channel and let other people embed the channel on their sites. You don’t get anchor text-passing links but you do build up a viewing audience. If your business model revolves around promoting videos, think outside the page-trap. Create visibility and brand value for yourself by letting other people embed your channel on their sites.

So now that you know how to create easy widgets for link building, here are a few suggested guidelines. The more you respect these suggested guidelines, the more benefit you will reap from widget-based link-building. The less you respect them, the less likely you’ll enjoy your experience.

1. Never bait-and-switch. The only time you should change the link on a widget is when you actually move the destination. Bait-and-switch linking is a totally black hat, unethical, spammy tactic and you will deserve any downside you get from it.
2. Exercise restraint. Link greed and anchor text greed have been the undoing of many a Webmaster. When you set up a widget, leave it alone. Don’t try to squeeze more value out of the links. Create other widgets to get other value.
3. Be considerate. Some widgetmasters demand specific placement or otherwise burden people with ridiculous rules. Screw them. You don’t need their content and if you’re a widgetmaster with rules I don’t need your content, either.
4. Watch your resources. Be careful not to overextend yourself. Your Webhosting service may not be as forgiving as Darth Vader’s emperor.

We get a lot of blog comments you never see because the SEOs who drop those links do not know what they are doing. Sure, you can add “great post!” comments to certain blogs and the bloggers won’t give you a second look — if they even exist. But when you want a comment link from an exceptionally picky blog, the average SEO trick won’t cut the mustard.

Here are a few tips that will work with any blogger (in my experience):

Limit your link to the submission form field – Blog software allows you to embed a link with your name as the anchor text. Use it. Limit yourself to that link.

Say something useful – I’ve often found myself approving comments from people I have not previously heard of because they have shared additional information or pointed out an error in something I wrote. Disagreeing with me doesn’t constitute pointing out an error in something I wrote.

Share a resource that you don’t control – Self-promotional links and promotions-for-clients stand out because they are disrespectful to the blogger and his audience. If you’re making a serious recommendation on someone else’s blog you tend to be more respectful in how you share it.

Participate in the discussion – I do occasionally comment on other people’s blogs, and those comments occasionally drive traffic to whatever sites I link to through my name. I’m not as interested in building traffic through comments on blogs as many SEOs but I do appreciate seeing the traffic. I generally refrain from commenting on blogs that I feel are faking it. If there is a legitimate discussion, even if I’m the first commenter, I’m more likely to comment.

Now, participating in the discussion isn’t a way of earning a link from a picky blogger — it’s a way of being a picky commenter. Just randomly dropping links on blogs because the articles contain my keywords isn’t my style. In fact, it’s a dumb idea (because people who do this are clearly and obviously seeking “relevant” links).

A truly relevant link is not connecting two sites through the keywords. Think about that.

It’s the concept that matters, not the anchor text and PageRank. A comment on someone else’s blog is an opportunity for you to prove to people you’re someone to be taken seriously and not just some link-dropping schmuck who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Web merchants with affiliate programs have long struggled with the conflict of interest between allowing their affiliates to rank well for brand expressions and competing directly with affiliates. When your affiliate sites outrank you you’re getting Indirect Search Placement. This builds second-tier search visibility for you, which is not as great as being the first-ranked site but at least you get some search visibility.

There are other ways you can build indirect search visibility, including: press releases (you appear in press release site searches and possibly news search); news stories (you appear in news search and may possibly get a favorable listing in Web search); blog articles and interviews (you appear in blog search and may possibly appear in Web search); Web directories (you appear in their search and possibly in search engines’ results).

The major search engines have all built filtering mechanisms into their algorithms to minimize indirect search placement, which has also been incorporated into many people’s search reputation management strategies. Nonetheless, through links and on-page copy and emphasis you can build up a lot of indirect search visibility through secondary sources.

Rather than launch a whole new campaign and initiative to build indirect search visibility, it’s better to optimize your link-building techniques so that they maximize your indirect search placement. Don’t just ask for a link. Build a relationship with a Web site that ensures dedicated copy about you (mentioning your site) establishes its own search visibility. You don’t just get a relevant link — you also get fantastic advertising and marketing reach.

Link building should not be confined to just acquiring links. It should achieve the maximum possible return on investment. You can measure ROI for link building in part by evaluating your indirect search placement.