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It was a big couple of weeks for Google.  First they tackled their long standing “Google Bombing” practice then they gave us a way to see more of the sites
linking to our domains.

But Google wasn’t the only one making news.  Robert Scoble declared the “best linkbaiter" and there were a couple articles on grabbing links via linkbaiting as well as the potential pitfalls of a good text link.

So let’s get to the Google news first.

It has been all over the web – the fact that Google now considers Google bombs to be ancient history.

That is because they claim to have refined their algorithms enough to negate the Google bomb effect.  And to be honest, a few checks of my favorite Googlebombs do show that they no longer exist.

For example, a search for “failure”, “miserable failure” and a handful of other similar terms seemed to always return the Whitehouse bio page for President Bush.  That has since been removed.

Now you may be wondering “what is a Google bomb?” Well it’s nothing terror related.  It’s simply a way to fool Google into giving a site a high ranking based on a huge volume of links.  For example, in the above instance, there were an enormous number of sites linking to the bio page using the same anchor text.  Therefore the page was getting an unnatural amount of link popularity for those phrases.

This is also why we recommend rotating your anchor text when you do link building.  Because if engines like Google see that all your links have the same anchor text your site could then also lose its rankings for that phrase because Google may have determined that your linking strategy was similar to a Google bomb.

Now this doesn’t mean that every single link should be different, but it does mean you should have a variety of phrases at hand and rotate some links every so often.

We could have linked to a variety of articles talking about this particular topic, but we found a pretty decent Wired article explaining what happened and why.

The other important Google news has to do with the ability to now get a more accurate count of your site’s Google links.

This has been an ongoing problem for webmasters and a real sore spot for most SEM’s because of Google’s apparent inability to show us all the links it has found pointing to a particular site.

For example, when you do a “link:somesite.com” search on the 3 main engines you could get a few hundred or thousand links on Yahoo! and MSN, but as few as a dozen on Google.

This is because Google claims to only show a portion of links (which represent all your links) and they also filter out non-relevant links.

All that changed with the addition of a “links” tab in your Google Webmasters Console.

If you have a Google account you too can get access to this valuable information.  Simply browse over to Google Webmaster Central and sign in.  Once there, create and submit your sitemap and watch the valuable data begin to flow your way.

You can find out more about it on our own blog, where Jarrod wrote a good article explaining it.  Also, for more information on Google Webmaster Central, check out the Webmaster help center.

So, who is the world’s best linkbaiter?  Well if you are Robert Scoble you think it’s Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple.

So why is Jobs the “world’s best linkbaiter?” Because he stirs up controversy.

You see, Jobs recently published his “Thoughts on Music” in which he discusses DRM (Digital Rights Management) on the music industry.  It has since caused quite a stir, but does that make him the world’s best linkbaiter?  We’ll let you be the judge of that.

Speaking of linkbait, there is a good article over at WebProNews that talks about what it takes to create good linkbait.

Really, it’s common sense – if you want to capture links and become a good linkbaiter you really need to get your titles down.  After all, the title is what initially catches the eye and if it isn’t compelling enough to capture the click, it probably isn’t going to be compelling enough to link to.

Finally today, Searchnews has a good write up on the dangers of over-optimizing your link text.  In it the author discusses how Google and other engines are attempting to combat “artificial” link building through complex analysis of the links pointing to your site.

The article then goes on to explain that your links need to appear natural - even if you are attempting to artificially influence your link popularity.  That means you must mix up your link text and descriptions as well as your link sources.

For example, if you submit your site to some 2^nd and 3^rd tier directories but use the same title and description for all submissions, then the engines are going to soon figure out that you are trying to artificially improve your link popularity.  And since they now know this there is a better chance that your site will stick on their radar for a while.  Furthermore any other links you get that use the same or similar anchor text could then be devalued or ignored based on the above logic – that you are attempting to artificially inflate your link popularity.

But hope is not lost, the article provides links to a few helpful tools to help you analyze your backlink anchor text to ensure that your site doesn’t trip any alarms.

Link Building Tip of the Week

We are now at that point in the newsletter where we provide you with a useful link building tip or site.

And today we recommend Directory Critic.  It is a fairly new list of directories but they offer some different sites you may not have heard of before.

Further, they have categorized their directories into such categories as free and paid, niche and deep linking, and more.

So if you were looking for specific sources of links why not check out Directory Critic.

So there you have it - a summary of the comings and goings of the link building world.  Be sure to watch for our next summary of link building news.