Linking Tips From The Trenches

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I’ve spent over a decade building links and publicity for websites. Back when I started in 1993, search engines didn’t care about links, other than to follow them looking for new pages to crawl. Times change. Now links rule. Even job titles like “Linking Specialist” are becoming common.

However, there’s an ugly downside when a search engine ranks pages based on linking analysis – link spam, link scams, the proliferation of incorrect information (“Reciprocal links are evil!” and “Paid links will get you banned!”), and an increase in the number of companies selling useless link building services (“100 Links for $99!”).

Businesses are worried. Worried they have done something wrong, worried they aren’t doing something right, worried their competitor has more links, worried they are stuck in a sandbox. Worried they have too few anchor text links, or too many. Worried about those links they bought – or sold.