After reading a thread in a forum with some frankly crap link building advice I thought I’d give it my ten bob.

  1. Don’t get a link from “links” pages on sites as these are about 1% as useful as your signature link on the 7th page of a forum thread, unless of course the Page is a PR 9 with a lot of back-links itself
  2. If a site wants to link to you from a page with 100 links on it you can basically forget it as the strength of the link is shared by, well, 100 others!
  3. So if you have a site about Dogs you might want to link out to Crufts or the Kennel Club or Wiki a good one.
  4. You need to get into the good neighbourhoods. Try and get links from the neighbourhoods at the top of Google for your key phrases after all Google likes these sites enough to rank them! Find that circle of sites where all the big boys in your industry link to and are linked from and get involved. For instance, try and get a link from a .gov site!
  5. See who links to your competitors and try and get a link as well (or pay money to have their link replaced with yours
  6. Use Yahoo and type “link:yourcompetitors.com” and see who links to them. Yahoo is kind enough to rank pages virtually by the number of back-links sites have in site explorer - making it one of my most used seo tools.
  7. Don’t waste your time with seo tools! Join Social Network tools like Delicious, Technorati and Stumble. There’s three links right there, although to be fair, they are not actually counted as linksby Google becasue of the Nofollow attribute. Digg links count, though.
  8. A link is a link. If someone, anyone wants to link to you accept, just don’t always reciprocate with a link back to them (negates the value of the link, almost) and could see your site lose trust. Remember Google says it is impossible for a site to hurt your site by simply linking to your site, but you can hurt your site if you link to another site with a ’shady’ backlink profile.
  9. It doesn’t hurt to get a link from a low or high Google Page Rank page. Today’s No-PR page might be a PR 5 page in reality, as Google Toolbar is out of date.
  10. Good Google rankings is not all about who you get a link from it’s who you link to - this is thought to be the measure of the trust of a site and seems fairly reasonable to me. Link to authority sites in your industry as well as other sites that look like quality upcoming sites, and stay clear of suspect sites.

Obviously I assume you have a blog with original content on it! And remember it’s quality of links not quantity. What, you want a bonus one as is normal blog etiquette?

Sod it - I can’t be bothered.

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