Last week during SMX East, the Link Building Boot Camp was a 75-minute overview of everything you ever wanted to know about link building and then some. This session was offered to anyone who wanted to learn the basics, get a solid understanding of links and prepare for the rest of the linking panels throughout the week. I was one of two speakers (I shared the podium with Eric) and covered the history behind link building, how links work, the concept of link popularity and how to get them.
The Q&A period drew a lot of raised hands, some of the questions were a reflection of current trends and others asked for clarification on concepts and tactics. All good questions but there were two the crowd seemed to dwell on - “are site wide links still effective” and “can getting a lot of links really fast from Digg hurt you“? Since there was a lot of interest in these two topics, I thought I’d share the answers here.
As the algo turns
When a man asked if site wide links still work I immediately said “yes, they do but not always for the long term…We’ve found they work best when competing with fewer links and when hosted on pages that are several years old.”
In the early days of search, link popularity was all about the numbers. If you had lots of inbound links and some keywords on the page, you ranked well. After time, the engines put more emphasis on query indicators and weighted keyword anchors. At the height of anchor text popularity you could “bomb” your way to the top fairly easily, even in the competitive markets.
In today’s linking landscape, where you place links seems to have as much impact as the keyword anchors they use. That makes it doubly important to find older quality pages within your niche to host links such as site wides. While they are easy to use, site wides have been known to lose their ability to pass link popularity if hosted among large numbers of unrelated links or on crappy pages.
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