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Are there Best Practices for Link Building?

In Search Engine Land's weekly column about link building, Eric Ward tackles a question about link building best practices. Is there such a thing?

Guess what? The answer is no.

He explains:

The problem with link building best practices is that if you ask ten link builders to agree on a set of best practices, each of them will be right, and each of them will be wrong, myself included.

What works for one link builder may not work for another link builder and vice versa. There's just no "standard" for link building. It comes down to the site's goals -- if they're looking to monetize, if they're looking for traffic, if they're looking for conversions, etc.

But since folks at Sphinn were looking for more, Eric has started a new column on his blog called Link Building Best Practices.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.



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posted Tamar Weinberg in Link Building at April 3, 2008 9:39 AM Comments (2)

Comments

There is no standard but I think there are indeed best practices. If you're not annoying Webmasters with link requests, that's a best practice. You can still contact people OCCASIONALLY and point out content that is relevatn and probably interesting to their visitors but ASKING FOR LINKS is NOT a best practice (in my opinion, of course).

A good rule of thumb is: If it would annoy a large sector of people, it's probably not a best practice.

 

One practice that we have recently added to our approach to SEO is to keep daily records of exactly where we rank in different search engines against different sets of keywords. We use this as a "baseline" for measuring performance etc... of our link building activity (investment). We use a free online tool called RankAngel (www.rankangel.com) to do this. If you setup projects - RankAngel will run tests for you daily etc... and graph the results. I dont know if this is a "best practice" - but I know that many people in the SEO game I talk to don't have a measurable baseline for their performance etc...

 

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