Wednesday, April 2, 2008

How The Link Building Best Practices Q and A Works

First Post - April 2, 2008, by Eric Ward

To ask a link building related question, either use the POST A COMMENT link at the bottom of any post, or email it to lbbp@ericward.com. Feel free to post as anonymous, and ask me anything you want about link building or content publicity. I moderate these questions so you wont have to read 8 million questions about how to rank first at Google for viagra.

I'll take your questions and turn them into posts where I provide my opinion on what the best practice should be for that particular topic. I don't pretend for one moment to believe that my best practices should be your best practices. I'm just using this avenue as a way to provide very specific advice and opinion developed over the course of building links for 1,000+ new and old sites from 1994 til today.

Empirical data is used infrequently to support my answers and opinions, and double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled studies were not conducted. I base my answers and best practice advice on what I see has worked (or not) for me.

I'm not doing this in place of my paid consulting and training, so if your question is about a specific web site or a sensitive subject that requires significant time and research for me to thoroughly answer, you might be better off trying my fee based service here.

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About The Link Building Best Practices Q and A
The Link Building Best Practices Q and A is provided free by Eric Ward. For sites with high value content, I offer several fee-based strategic linking services on a project basis.

21 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

What are some of your best practices for submitting to directories? Since they have been devalued by Google, do you still use them?

April 3, 2008 12:05 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Is the $300 yahoo link is worth it? If not, why not?

April 4, 2008 7:29 PM  
Anonymous Steve said...

What can we as business owners do to best leverage link building as a means of improving our search visibility?

How can we sucessfully obtain links without soliciting for them?

What can we do right now to improve our link building efforts in terms of improving search visibility?

What signs do you look for to determine what a good link is?

Would you suggest obtaining links to improve your position int he search results?

what is the most accurate method of analyzing back links from competitors? Should I even bother?

Thank-you,

Steven

April 10, 2008 11:47 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Eric

Some of my sites are to "left" as you would say and would probably benefit from inclusion in directories. But which ones are worth it?

Getting in dmoz is so hit and miss of course. Yahoo is no doubt sound (though expensive) but what others are worth it ...botw, joeant ?

Could you suggest others?

April 11, 2008 6:17 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

What are the best practices for using sponsored themes to gain links?

April 28, 2008 9:46 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Great new concept. I enjoy your work. My questions are:

Do Digg and Stumbles help? Is good ole fashioned link trade emails back in vogue?

Thanks for your time.

April 29, 2008 10:48 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Do you ever recommend the use of NOFOLLOW on links within your own site, to de-emphasize certain pages. I read about this on SEOMoz, and it seems counter-intuitive to me.

May 10, 2008 12:36 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi I was doing link building distributing clients articles, we prepare on purpose, with no more 5 links in the document including resource box, but actually before 3 months I see google take them to the top but before a week google return them to the same position when we started, is a credible tactic distributing articles or I must have to return to directory and link interchange links tactics thanks
jorge jalvarado@posicionarte.net

May 18, 2008 10:12 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey Eric,

Awesome stuff. I can't seem to stop reading up on your opinions and practices for link building.

What is your general time line for a follow up to secure a link an another site? What about if the site had the link, but went to a broken landing page, when should you follow up after initial contact to get that fixed?

May 28, 2008 10:28 AM  
Anonymous Wiep said...

I'd love to see another post, so that's why I'll drop a comment here?

How about a Best Practices for contacting potential targets? I know it's been done several times, but I'm sure you're able to share some great insights ;)

June 5, 2008 3:51 PM  
Blogger Matthew said...

Simple question - as somebody who has an e-commerce site wanted higher rankings, what should I hire somebody to do on a daily basis to get more links?

June 9, 2008 1:43 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi eric,

Good stuff. But can you let us know what are some best practices of link building and some new ways of link building.

Thanks

July 1, 2008 1:26 PM  
Blogger TravelingNinja said...

I've taken a new site from 1 backlinks to 350 in five months of hard work. I've done the basics: submitted to niche and free mainstream directories, posted in forums, exchanged some links, and requested some links. What can I do next?

September 16, 2008 8:56 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

How to manage a cost - effective link building campaign? What are the most important aspects to have in mind, most in these difficult times, if you are spending money in a link building campaign, you want to know that the money you spent is worth it. Thanks.

October 13, 2008 11:52 PM  
Anonymous rajasekaran said...

can u anyone tell me clearly what are benefits in link building services

October 28, 2008 8:21 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Eric,
I have a celebrity gossip blog. i am finding it very hard to build links for the site. I had approached some the very popular gossip blogs such as splashnewsonline.com and many more but not receiving any response from them. it would be nice if you could give me some suggestion about how I could build links for my celebrity gossip blog. Please contact me at mailadreana@gmail.com

November 1, 2008 1:57 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hello Eric,
Soon our public site pages (http) will be redirecting to secured site pages (https).

To avoid duplicate content, through the robot.txt and Google webmaster tool we will be excluding the secured site from being indexed.

However, I'm concerned about how other sites will link to us when the URL in the browser box will have an https address.

In other words, how will having a secured site affect our link building strategy?

Thanks, JP

November 20, 2008 1:25 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Eric,

In terms of anchor text what is the best approach? Obviously anchor text isn't everything as there are many other factors that determine a quality link, but in terms of the anchor text if you wanted to rank well for "vacation rentals florida" and "holiday homes florida" would anchor text such as "vacation rentals and holiday homes florida" give weight to both search terms?

Or is it only advisable to target the exact terms as the anchor text?

I personally think that the algorithm and backlink approach is flawed and that its possible that Google and other search engines may place less emphasis on anchor text(if not already) due to manipulation and place more emphasis on other signals.

When websites rank really well for a search term and have 70% of their anchor text as "keyword" this is just so un-natural and is so open to abuse which is the case.

Just my crazy thoughts!!

January 9, 2009 9:42 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Eric, great blog.

I would like to know if it is best to have link bait sent to bloggers so they post it, or have a link back to your site?

Thanks.

NH

February 9, 2009 12:39 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Quick question: Is there any type of penalty for submitting the same article to multiple article site?

March 31, 2009 10:17 AM  
Blogger Eric Ward said...

In my opinion, if an article is original and full of outstanding information, it is best to post it on your own site first, and then wait for it to be crawled by the engines. Think of this as a signal of authorship for the bots. If after doing this, you then submit the article(s) elsewhere, at least the originating source
has been identified by the engines.

Aside from this, I think 99% of article marketing strategies are pointless. Have a look at he below link

http://snipurl.com/exgsx

The mass of junk this creates is useless to the engines.
If you were Google, why would you trust any article,
unless it lived on the creator's own site?

There are better ways to push content.

Eric

March 31, 2009 1:51 PM  

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