Jon Quinton, SEO Consultant, SEOgadget

Martin Macdonald, SEO Strategy Director, Expedia

Matt Roberts, VP Product Development, Linkdex

David Wilding, Head of SEO, Blueclaw Media

Our takeaway points from the session can be found below:-

• As an industry we have generally been reactive to the latest updates. In reality we are not going to spend time getting thousands of links removed when we suspect devaluation or a penalty. Its being clever about the steps you take.
• The way in which we get links in a scalable way has changed. Much of the focus is now on the process and understanding your existing link profile. Do you have good relationships with the sites linking to you etc. Look at the new feature on Majestic around citations.
• Building good relationships remains key. Without genuine contacts and relationships its difficult to influence sectors. Without these types of relationships its more difficult to build links at scale.
• Control is crucial, can you remove and likewise add links to sites quickly and easily. Traditionally this type of control has been lacking.
• It is possible to recover rankings in a short period of time. In the car insurance sector a couple of highly competitive sites lost good rankings but were able to recover them in around six weeks through un-engineering its link profile. You need to be sure about whether you have been penalised or whether the links you have, have been devalued.
• Whats happened was not unexpected with regards to recent updates. Google has been saying for the last decade that these changes were coming. The focus should be on what type of link profiles will look for in two years time. Authorship and other proof concepts could become key.
• For big and even small brands the first step for link building should be approaching sites that have mentioned your brand but not linked to you. It’s very effective and a quick win.
• Some agencies are bringing PR functions in house to help with outreach. Link building methods are very much being driven by the relationships formed by PR specialists.
• Google is building a large database of people who sell links. If your profile contains links from many of these then it will be apparent to Google. This has been achieved in part through people who have reported links they have bought back to Google when hit by a penalty. It’s easy for them to nuke sites from this.
• It’s easy to spot an SEO, Google is getting better at spotting it now.
• Google has had a lot of bad press about spam and is possibly a reason as to why they are doing something about a lot of the link techniques and spam now.
• Incentives is the only way to truly get the number of links you need (Martin). An example is giving away free money in the gambling sector.
• Social competitions are a great way to gain links, especially in sectors where content is similar across numerous competitor sites. Job sites for example.
• Backup a piece of the content that has gained or you have built links to with social validation. This should happen naturally but if you have built the links with other techniques then you need to make it look more natural. A good piece of content should be shared naturally.
• Members of the panel have gained rankings just using social mentions/bookmarks. Sites will need links though.
• Can’t ignore Google+ and rel=author. This increases click through rates but it might impact upon the link building we have done previously, eventually.

The post SASCON 2012: Link Building Session appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Richard Baxter kicks the session off with a ‘Fun with Metrics’ presentation.

To analyse the way in which websites ranking and to identify the metrics, he is using the test search term ‘ UK SEO’.

Page authority by SEOmoz allows you to view how authoritative a certain page is in terms of links that are pointing to it. There is a clear correlation between high page authority and good rankings in the search engines – bar a few anomalies.

Domain authority also has a correlation with search rankings.

The next metric is root domains linking to a specific page. Apart from a few anomalies there is more linking root domains pointing to the higher positioned website in search results.

Moving on to another metric is the inbound links with specific anchor text. For the text results page being examined, there is a website in position 4 with a really high amount of inbound links containing ‘uk seo’ in the anchor text. Reviewing the linking root domains though, shows that there are many pages but only one or two domains – providing that there isn’t much authority being passed through.

It’s all well and good analysing the competitors and reviewing the data, but in the time that you did that you could write some blog posts or do some link building to help you improve for a specific term.

What the Analysis Taught Him

• Tools may provide an insight, but use your experience and judgement.
• Page authority and domain diversity play a role.
• Focus on links that will improve your domain and page authority.
• A lot of anchor text links from the same domain probably won’t help all that much
• You’re better focusing on high quality links rather than high volume, low quality links

Now over to Kristjan Mar Hauksson.

Ground rules of ePR

- do not distribute the same text to multiple locations
- rewrite to two or three versions
- write it short and “scanable”
- don’t spam it with links, two or three tops

One of the main issues when distributing with ePR is that people post the same copy many times, meaning there could be many duplicates of the same text on the web.

Using ePR with good content can be highly influential in terms of readers and also the search engines.

Using this method allowed Bradford and Bingley to rank very highly for a number of highly competitive terms.

Another method of getting links is via distribution feeds. Google News allows you to have a position in the organic SERPs for news results, and your content will also be picked up by other major websites to be redistributed or linked to.

PR leap, market wire and press port are good services for the distribution of content.

Neil Walker now takes to the stand.

How to choose the right links for the right occasion

The keyword competition / industry can dictate the links you should build.
- niche /directory submissions?
- to buy or not to buy?
- niche authority sites/memberships/white papers
- link bait

Building your own content network

Advantages:
- reliability
- control (theme, building speed, position, anchor text)
- useful for deep linking
- useful resource for link acquisition (contacting other networks etc)
- references/citations (for Google local, for example)

Disadvantages
- recreating link power
- if the network goes down then so do all your links
- maintenance of network

Do’s
- domain names – purchase domains
- TLDs – look for a variety of top-level domains
- hosting – purchase IP addresses and nameservers
- WhoIs – different whois information for each site
- unique content – write unique content for each website
- optimise the websites – make them search engine friendly

Dont’s
- Google Analytics – don’t put them all on the same analytics account
- Webmaster Tools – same as above
- Interlinking – don’t like them all together, keep them seperate
- Duplicate Content – don’t use the same content on every site
- Percentage of Links – don’t link your whole network to one single site

Over to Joost de Valk (aka Yoast)

Building Links, Easily, Cheapily

An idea from Yoast:

Setup a blog – or a network of blogs
Place the same content on all of the blogs
Build links to the initial blog
Use cross-domain canonical tag across all of the domains, pointing at the original one

This hasn’t been tested, but he’s positive that the method would work. He would like people to test this and let him know if it works.

And finally, Ralph Tegtmeier (aka Fantomaster)

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing – this applies to SEO and link building. You need to make your link profile look as organic and natural as possible. Don’t listen to clients who wish just to get links from PageRank 5 links and do-follow links. You need to have a diverse link profile.

The post Advanced Link Building – SAScon 2010 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

I’m a little apprehensive at the thought of opening the floodgates, but what we give out in link love, we hope to gain in contributions to the conversation.

Has anyone had experience – good or bad?

The post Moving to 'Do-Follow'? appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Most people in the industry know it’s time consuming, and often tedious, but you can’t argue with the results you get from a good link building campaign.

There are so many methods, that it’s difficult to teach, but we’ve put together a link building process flow here:

It’s a bit like a ‘Choose your own adventure‘, so print it out for each client or website, and mark off the paths you’ve travelled. Repeat paths that are keyword specific for each of your keywords or phrases.

(Right click and rotate to see it the right way round).

The post Link Building Process appeared first on PushON Ltd.