Michael Palka was first up in the Link Building Basics session. Michael is from Ask Jeeves and he begins with a bit of stats on how well Ask is doing. He goes over the Subject Specific Popularity and Community concept, this was discussed in my blog and in this forum several times. Read more on that here.
Magnus Sandberg from Google was next up. Again, this is pretty much same old, same old. Good content and everything else will come.
Mike Grehan was next up, fashioning his new company Smart Interactive. He starts off stating that Danny, Chris nor himself are the leading experts in this industry. He then puts up a picture of a cartoon like person, and compare its propeller hat with those of the people at the engines, who tell you to spin your wheels. Mike, I guess its safe to reuse some jokes, is it the first SES conference in Sweden? Anyway...
He then moves into how triangular linking works, and how a search engine can spot it. Ammon Johns and I had a thread about this at Cre8asite. Then Mike brings up his "GAS" Google Anxiety Syndrome to describe Florida. He then brings up that people in the forums feel like its going to happen again. Basically, he said, get links within communities. And gives us his ten essentials about linkage, I have this noted in a previous session, I will link to it shortly. He then says, from a link building perspective, its best to not break up articles on multiple pages. Throughout the speech, he comes right out and says to get links, you buy them (see his article). He ends off with a plug to the new orgs SMA-UK, etc.
Thomas Bindl from Optop was next up, after Mike hitting him with a joke or two about how he sells links (or not). Thomas goes through the process of asking for links. Use a search engine to find links, relevant to your site, based on the query you want to rank well for. Use directories, newsgroups, magazines, forums, adwords, help charities and look at your competitors. What are "Swedish Reindeer Food", I think Thomas has a client that sells packaged Swedish Reindeers. Ok, he recommends not sending automated emails or using terms like "cross-linking", "link exchange", etc. He then gets into (and I quote) "the dark side of the industry" or buying links. Directory links, ad links and "sponsored links" aka high PR links. What are the link building risks? Bad neighborhoods, too many links in a short period of time (sandboxing - he stares down the Google rep) and a penalty for buying links.
Q & A:
Q: How are internal links weighted? A: Google says that it wont get you more "PageRank" but that doesn't mean its not useful, he says. Google said its good because people can navigate to your site, and more accessible to the pages.
Q: What is up with the Google link: command? A: Google says they are not reporting all your links back to your site. So think before using it.
