Cameron Olthuis

In a recent entry, 5 Things That Won’t Help With SEO, I talked about the dangers of link exchange programs and why you should avoid reciprocal linking with sites that don’t offer value to your users. Now there’s word straight from the horses mouth.

Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable has been providing complete session reviews from the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago. His latest review, Search Engine Q&A On Links, is from a session where representatives from the 4 major search engines (Ask Jeeves, Google, Yahoo, and MSN) discuss proper linking strategies and also conduct a Q&A. This is one session I wish I really could’ve attended, it clears up a lot of questions about link strategies.

Here’s some quotes that I found interesting from Barry’s review:

Kaushal Kurapati, Senior Product Manager of Search, Ask Jeeves

- Be Cautious of reciprocal links and buying links
- Avoid link farms, cloaked pages, hidden links and links by images.
- Focus on your business and content, the rest will follow

Charles Martin from Google

- Be the user when building links
- use unique relevant content to attract links
- Avoid; recip links, poor quality link exchanges, fishy looking sites, who you link to can affect your reputation.
- He specifically says “You can be held accountable for linking to people”
- Do not obsesses with back links
- Design site with user in mind

Tim Mayer, Director of Product Management, Yahoo!

- There is this intense focus on link building, Tim says. There is very little focus on building quality content. If you build good content, people will link to it.
- Links should be related and designed to help the user
- Add unique and useful content that invites others to link to your site
- Don’t use link exchanges or buy links

I noticed they also mention that you shouldn’t buy links. I would agree that you shouldn’t buy links for the purpose of increasing your search engine rankings. I do however think it’s ok to purchase links as a form of advertising if you think it will drive targeted traffic to your site. It won’t boost your rankings but if it will increase your sales then why not.

Another thing I found very interesting is that all of them talk about focusing on your users first, a point I try to get across every chance I get. I briefly mentioned this in the 10 Rules For Web Startups entry but I’ve also been writing an in-depth article on focusing on your users first. I was hoping to have it done by now, hopefully the amount of time it’s taking indicates the quality of the article.