I’ve yet to do a large-scale link building project - one that involves emailing hundreds of people and asking for links.
The tedium of contacting all these folks site by site daunts me, and yet I know it’s a great way to get the word out, and yet another of the ways that PR and SEO have merged… especially if your out reach emails are strong introductions for your site.
Anyways, in talking with a great friend and colleague yesterday he described his recent large-scale link building efforts and said he weeded out sites with PRs under 4 (also, that sites with a PR of 4 were more likely to give links for his highly niche client site).
My link building efforts tend towards the community involvement and media (articles, blog posts, etc) distribution, and as I want to really blow some of my clients out of the water I decided that I’m going to do some seriously tedious but potentially valuable linking campaigns.
So Aaron Wall dropped a nice tidbit that comes right on time for me - I hope it helps you in your efforts as well when it comes to identifying large numbers of folks who are potential link partners: cache date.
In comments Wall clarified what he determines by the cache date:
* general health of a site you own
* general site of a health you are thinking of buying
* general health of a site you have the ability to publish content on
* trustworthiness of a link source
It is this last purpose that I’ll bring up with my buddy who’s going to scrape scrape scrape (and then scrub a little too I hope 
me up a huge pile of urls and email addys so I can start going “door to door” more effectively for my clients.
Most SEMs don’t believe that Google actually uses PageRank. I think that if it’s all you have you should use it, but hey, it’s not all you have (and really there are tons of factors besides even cache date you should be thinking about when you conduct link building campaigns… I’m sure Fishkin has a post on this somewhere and I’ll poke around for it for you .
Wall linked to, and so will I, a tool from Boykin called the Cool Cache SEO Tool!
And while you’re at it link builders, check out Making your content Del.icio.us by Mr. Patel.
And then quit thinking about marketing with me for a moment and meditate on the reason many Americans had the day off today… Martin Luther King, Jr.: “I Have a Dream” (20 minute video of his famous speech).
Posted on January 15, 2007
