Advanced Link Building Forum
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The final session for myself was the “Advanced Link Building Forum” any session on link building I was determined to be at. I was a bit torn here as I would also liked to have gone to the “Optimizing flash & Non-HTML Content” session that ran parallel to it. I decided though that linking strategies was more important.

This was moderated by Chris Sherman (Searchwise and associate editor of searchenginewatch) with speakers Matt Cutts (Google), Paddy Bolger (Top-Pile), Warren Cowan (Greenlight) and Dixon Jones (Receptional.com). Particularly impressive was graphical representation of what was like a linkage radar chart. I believe this was from Warren Cowen. It is impossible to explain without showing it but it highlighted all aspects of linkage on a chart and you could work out how valuable a link would be based on, if memory serves me correctly, around 10 different linking aspects. The more of the radar you filled in the better the link. Such aspects as thematic/page relevance, number of outgoing links, authority status, prominence, anchor text, hub or not and others that escape me. It was well explained but may have been over the heads of any beginners there. It was however called “advanced link building forum”. It highlighted WHY forum links, link farm links, guestbook links, off theme links are not weighted as highly as thematic links from authority sites. An excellent presentation all told. Matt Cutts also went into additional detail about how quality not quantity of links is important. That cross linking between similar sites is not in itself a no-no as long as there are good reasons to do so apart from ranking reasons. It was also hinted that Google finds suspect a large number of links pointing to the same site with identical link text. It looks (and 9/10 times is) a sign of manipulation of its page rank algorithm though the purchase of links and artificial linkage. Natural links don’t always use the same link text, Google is looking for natural linkage. In other words alternate link text for your inbound links. Good to hear confirmation of what many SEOs cottoned on to a while ago.

The Google sandbox was briefly mentioned. One of the panels mentioned it could occur when a site launches and all of a sudden a large number of links point to it with the same link text. So the sandboxing may well just be a filter for those sites that have an exorbitant amount of incoming links on launch. It is the links that are sandboxed not the site. This might explain why only some sites get sandboxed and not others. Matt Cutts on the other hands basically thought there was nothing in it and that there is no sandboxing “I don’t know where this sandboxing theory started from..” In others words there is still no answer to the sandbox question, whether it exists or not. My personal opinion is there is a form of quarantine going on some new sites which is triggered possibly by an unusually fast link development or from cross linking on same ip c blocks or one of possibly many other factors. It is being seen too often, and where there is smoke…

On buying links it was suggested that you shouldn’t buy links for PageRank or link popularity but for traffic. Google can easily spot sites that allow payment for links. They usually have links next to each other that go off to completely unrelated websites. It doesn’t take too many PhDs (of which Google has more than its fair share) to work out which sites are selling links and which aren’t. It is not a crime however and can make sense as long as you are very careful who you buy your links from and especially to if you are selling links. Linking to bad neighborhoods is still a no-no and can affect your ranking. Thematic linking is the way to go. Link out and get links from sites of the same theme or similarly related theme, get links from authority sites and don’t rely on many forum links / guest books. It’s hard work, but as Matt Cutts really pushes, you need to look at your content and find a way to include some unique content that is going to get linked to from other sites within your own field naturally. That certainly worked for me but it took a lot of time and work.

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