Just a quick one while I wait for my car to be cleaned, I thought I would express my thoughts on recent link building strategies as this is probably my strongest point.
As much as I hate referring to Google algorithm updates the recent changes made by Google coinciding with the Panda update have heavily effected search results, more than I have seen in the last couple years anyway.
Every man and his dog has written about how the most recent changes have effected content, the general gist being that people with duplicate content (across multiple domains) or weak content will have less probability to achieve anything significant and so they shouldn’t, there is nothing worse than hitting site after site with useless content.
But what has the effect of these changes had on link building? Does anyone care? In the 50+ SEO/Online Marketing related RSS feeds I subcribe to I have seen little to nothing about it!
So What Did Change?
The most significant change (that hit Australia only 2 weeks ago) has been sever penalties to sites with low link variation. Basically anyone who practised solely low quality link building e.g. forum profiles, blog commenting and so on and did not put in the effort to create solid properties at the same pace. Even when filtered through web 2.0 properties.
What Still Works?
Near everything still works just as it used to in my experience, with the exception of Forum profiles, low quality mass blog comments and strait up footer links/theme sponsorship type links have taken a dive on their previous ability to impact rankings. These should only have been a very small and insignificant part of your link building strategy anyway.
As for the link building factors that are now receiving more weight there is only two:
- Social Media
- Links Embedded In Slabs Of Content (not even necessarily relevant content).
Cool Twitter Badge. USE IT!
An important note on the above two points is that I am not referring to low quality mass social and in content links, I am talking about quality. Facebook and Twitter profiles with hundreds of followers, links in quality unique content on authoritative domains (so no, not article marketing).
All of my sites demonstrating these above factors in abundance without exception have made significant ranking improvements without any recent alternate link building or content for that matter.
Lastly the ranking shifts seem to be coming a lot slower but consistent improvements can still be had with the right variation. High PR home page links and utilising web 2.0 properties are still the ducks nuts when it comes to building solid domain authority.
My car is done so more on this later…
Looking Shmick