SMX East Conference Linking Highlights

Posted Thursday 8th October 2009 by Ben J in Link Building.

The Search Marketing Expo, or SMX, is a search engine conference organised by Third Door Media; the brains behind Sphin and a range of other search engine news and media sites. Holding a number of events a year in a range of locations around the world, SMX is a great opportunity for search engine optimisation experts to share ideas, hold discussions with others in the field and attend a number of seminars and Q&A sessions held by some of the top names in search.

The recently held SMX East conference ran from the 5th to 7th of October at the Javits Convention Centre in New York City and featured over 60 sessions on SEO, PPC, localised & mobile search and social media amongst other topics. One of the subjects discussed was linking and today we’ll be providing highlights of the question and answer session on this subject.

Ask the Link Builders

The coverage was provided by a live blogging tool by RustyBrick’s Barry Schwartz and questions were taken from both attendees and via Twitter through the hashtag #smx. The speakers were Rae Hoffman who is the owner of Sugarrae Internet Consulting; Roger Montti, owner of Martinibuster; Debra Mastaler, the president of Alliance-Link and Eric Ward the CEO of EricWard.com.

After a brief introduction, the questions on linking were flying thick and fast, from both attendees and Twitter users. On the question of whether old paid links in directories were harming a site’s rankings, the consensus from Rae Hoffman and Eric Ward was that they shouldn’t be doing any real damage unless there was a large number of them and they were the only links the site had.

On the topic of whether there was such a thing as too much cross-linking within a network, the answer seems to be that ‘it depends.’ Although it’s widely believed that too much cross linking will lead to penalisation, a small amount of it won’t do any damage. Linking from your homepage to your blog and vice versa and having a couple of friends or friendly company websites do this will be OK, but having a large number of these is likely to damage your listings. As Rae Hoffman put it – ‘Four sites is okay, but not 400 or 4000.’ A comment from Michael Martinez stated ‘I would say don’t do all the cross-linking at once. Spread it out over months, years.’

What Is The Best Linking Tactic?

Naturally, the question of what the single best linking tactic would be from a search engine optimisation perspective was raised and, naturally, there was no single answer. Eric Ward suggests that you allow users who click on your links to interact with the site in some way, either through generating their own content or Tweeting it which he states would hopefully encourage your users to link to you and turn them into your own link building team.

Rae Hoffman’s suggestions were to ensure that your site’s internal linking structure was sound and to contact your competitor’s links to see if you can get your own link on their site. She also mentioned that using the ‘nofollow’ tag for links was a bad idea. As she put it ‘don’t use nofollow internally and don’t do it externally, if you don’t want to link somewhere, don’t link there.’ A general consensus was found on the subject of linking to or requesting links from bad sites, which could negatively impact your rankings.

With the ever changing face of search it seems that more than ever, link builders are focussing on the quality of their links to increase the visibility and traffic of their sites rather than the blanket approach which worked to raise site’s rankings in search engines in the past, and it seems that this trend will continue for the foreseeable future.

Related Posts

1. Social Linking – The Alternative To Directory Links
2. Linking Strategies And Paid Links In SEO
3. Social Bookmarking For Backlinks
4. Link Wheeling Your Site
5. Importance of Linking

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