Order Matters, Says the Sandbox (Or, Where to start in a link building campaign)

My recently published article, 101 Ways to Build links, shows that you have many, many link building tactics at your disposal. For any given website, you probably need to use at least a few dozen link building different tactics over the course of a year or more to rank for anything remotely competitive.

One thing I didn't mention in the article, though, was that for a brand new site you need to build certain types of links first. Why? Thank TrustRank/the sandbox. To even get fully indexed (now that we have sandbox crawling), let alone ranked, you'll need to get the domain some trust right off the bat, and this is only going to happen by building certain types of links in a certain way.

OK, so what is "certain types of links in a certain way"? Basically, we need trusted links to happen first, and then a "natural growth curve". Want specifics?

When I launch a new site, I go after two types of links right away:

My short-short-very-short list of trusted paid directories (Business.com, Dir.yahoo.com, sbd.bcentral.com)

Link begging/buying/bartering at sites which already rank in the top 1-200 (if they're ranking, they have some trust)

The latter is time-consuming and frustrating -- but it has to be done, and sooner is better than later.  From Stuntdubl's recent post:Other Notes: Authority links are an absolute must for
improving your trust score these days. This is a MUST for a new site,
and should be where you start your efforts, and always be dedicating
SOME time. Suck it up, and take the time it takes to get some quality,
trusted links. The existence of trusted authority links will make or
break your site. Find the 800 lb. gorillas in your field, and **find a
way to get on a dozen or so of them. Failing that, hunt their backlinks, and find a way to get on some of those pages.  Use some creative queries with the combination tool.  Give the tattler a shot.

Anyway, once I have a few authority links (even getting 3 is quite an accomplishment), I wait a week or two, make sure the site gets indexed deeply, and then move into other types of link building tactics -- article syndication, social networking gaming, quality reciprocals, etc. Even if a few (or more than a few) low quality links make it into the link profile, it's not going to kill anything, since I gave the site a spine first.

Buying Links at TLA... The Movie!

Readers, Rich over at MindSmack just completed a real cool video that gives an overview on the link buying process at TLA.  Their team did a great job on the flash video, if you ever need any help in that department, Rich can be reached at: rich (at) mindsmack.com  Head over to this page to check the video out now!

101 Ways To Keep Aaron Wall & Andy Hagans busy!

Readers, I was wondering what Andy has been up to...

Looks like he teamed up with Aaron Wall and they have been doing some killer research to come up with this list:

101 Ways To Build Link Popularity in 2006

Well done and well worth a read.

TLA Account Management Improvements

TLA users, we have made some big design/usability tweaks to your "my account" area today.  As always, Chris did a killer job.  I think you will find it a lot easier to navigate around and manage your account with ease.  As always, if there is anything else we can improve to make your life easier, let me know. Thanks!

Is a .edu or .gov link just another link?

A very common request I will hear is, "do you guys have access to any .edu or .gov links?".  The answer is "no" and I have felt for some time that many link builders put too much emphasis on the search for these links.  For many link builders, .edu and .gov links are the "dmoz" links of a couple of years ago.  Meaning, I think the height of the DMOZ craze was about two years ago when many website owners thought getting listed in DMOZ was the magic pill to shoot to the top of the search results.

Now I am not saying that DMOZ, .edu, or .gov links are not links worth having but I do think their is some evidence that they are not the silver bullet to the top.  You need many quality, or as Mr. Hagans would say "trusted links", and spending weeks on end trying to get the one .edu or .gov link is in my opinion not any more valuable then securing a few other non .edu or .gov quality links.  Is there now some evidence of this?  Maybe...(below quote taken from Blogoscoped who transcripted off Matt Cutt's new seo video)Somebody else asked about links
from .govâs and .euâs, and whether links from two level deep .govâs and
.euâs (like gov.pl), are worth the same as .gov. And the fact is, we
donât really have much in the way to say, this is a link from the ODP,
or from .gov, or .eu, to give that some sort of special boost. Itâs
just those sites tend to have higher PageRank, because more people link
to them (and reputable people link to them).So this statement seems to say that Dmoz, .edu. and .gov links are not given special treatment from Google it is just that these links generally have higher PR and are just another trusted link.  I say build quality links like crazy and not worry about these three alleged special links.  What have you readers seen in regards to this?  Are Dmoz, .gov, and .edu all glitter and no gold?