Well another couple weeks have passed so it is now time to again review the discussions
and articles relating to the link building world.

With SES London happening this week it has been a little quiet, but that hasn’t stopped many more authors weighing in the topic of link building.

First, to Google Sitelinks. These are links which appeared in Google about a year ago, and only to a select few users. At first many thought it was some hijacking attempt by a toolbar or other browser plugin. Certainly, it was thought, this couldn’t be a new Google feature, could it?

Sure enough, Google ‘fessed up and admitted to playing with the organic results by sticking a few more links in underneath the descriptions of popular sites, as this image shows:

It is the links under the main Zappo site (brand list, Boots, Dress, Handbags) which are called Sitelinks.

Over at Search Engine Land they have a very good article explaining what Sitelinks are. It is a short article that is worth the read, especially if you too were wondering just what these Sitelink things were.

Webpronews was full of link building related articles these past couple of weeks. This one does a pretty good job of explaining how one could approach link building.

Later on we found an article entitled “Heck No” to NoFollow. It was written in response to the growing disdain for the Nofollow attribute assigned to most links now.

There is growing dissatisfaction with the use of Nofollow these days primarily because what it is now being used for more than it was originally intended. When it was first introduced it was done so in an effort to combat comment spam (this occurs when automated systems post comments with links on blogs. These links then got counted as backlinks).

However there have been more and more sites who have decided to use Nofollow to limit link popularity transference on other links as well. Even those found within a regular page’s content.

Now some site owners are rebelling against the “nofollow” tag by circumventing it to allow link popularity to flow, and just being more diligent in manually filtering spam.

Also from Webpronews, comes some encouraging news that 301 redirects pass PageRank in 2 weeks. This question has been hotly debated on the webmaster forums for years. Many believed that 301 redirects won’t pass ANY link popularity, while just as many feel that a 301 redirected URL should pass ALL link popularity.

Well according to the article, Google has come out and confirmed that it can sort out a 301 Redirect and pass PageRank usually within 2 weeks. This should help settle many old debates.

This is good news for both site owners and link builders who change domain names or otherwise change their site negating any link building efforts which had previously been undertaken.

Now, according to this article, as long as you have the proper 301 redirects in place your efforts should be redirected to the new URL within a couple weeks.

Finally today is a discussion of useful tools in helping build links. In particular, the use of custom counters as a way to encourage linking to your site.

The person who started the thread had noticed that a site garnered a lot of incoming links, which the engines approved of, merely by sharing a website counter. So he posed the question: Is this legitimate and will it work?

Many people chimed in, and most seem to think that it wasn’t very useful.

What do you think? Do you believe that such techniques are worthwhile link building techniques? Or should one stick to more “tried and true” methods?

Link building tip of the week

Now comes the point in the article where we give you a free link building tip. This week we take a look at Directory Critic’s new directory list.

This can be a great source of links as many times a new directory will forgo fees for submissions simply to build their database. That means you can get in on the ground floor of a new directory which could become a major player in the months and years to come.

Imagine that, having a free link from a directory which could result in not only huge link popularity transference to your site, but also huge traffic to your site. Well it could happen with some of these new directories.

Best of all, Directory Critic updates this list weekly. Therefore you should bookmark it and return regularly to add your site to those new directories where you think your site fits.

So there you have it – the top articles and forum discussions for the past 2 weeks. Be sure to return next time to see what other link building news is making headlines.