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Rand Fishkin over at SeoMoz.org posted an article on his blog yesterday that got me thinking about an article I was wanting to write a while back.....

He was having a little fun talking about some of the ways that Google could detect link networks in order to combat paid links. A topic that I’m sure most of the people reading our blog have thought about many times. The same subject that I, as a link builder, must consider on a daily basis.

While these sorts of hypotheticals are good to ponder at times and definitly worth considering when trying to stay ahead of the curve, I think most webmasters would also benefit from seeing things from another perspective.

Contemplating what Google is doing to COMBAT links is important but I think less time should be spent thinking about that and more time spent understanding that it really doesnt matter.  Its all relative....

Google will continue to raise the bar on linking standards, but how that bar affects your particular industry will always be relative to what your competition is doing.

You Dont Need Perfect Links, You Only Need Better Links Then Your Competitors

While Google will continually give lower quality links less weight and in some rare casis, no weight at all, it will not matter as long as you have better links then the other people in your industry.

In some industries something as simple as reciprocal links could be all you need to build in order to outdo your competittion.  While reciprocal links carry very little weight anymore in Google, they still carry some weight, and there are still some very non-competitive terms out there where a site could rank well with reciprocals alone especially if there are very little other websites targetting those industry terms.

In the case where you are in a competitive industry where companies are spending tens of thousands of dollars to build natural looking links through “More Advanced” linking methods reciprocals are obviously going to do very little for you.

Now I realize that some webmasters/companies want to do everything they possibly can to obtain the absolute best links possible, and in some cases they are justified.  If you have the resources and/or just want to be super prepared for any future algorithmic changes, then obtaining the absolute best links might be the right thing for you. 

So what sorts of links are better then others?  Well, that topic has been discussed a million times in other places, so I’ll leave that for another article.  For now, if you are not sure, I suggest you find a link building expert who can show you results from past clients.  Anyone can hypothisize about what they think Google is doing, but the real experts can show you examples of what has worked for their other clients.  Theories dont matter, results do.

I hope noone reading this post is under the impression that this article is at all attacking Rand.  His article was a great read, and he is an excellent link builder.  He is one of the few link builders out there that I give credit too, he definitly knows his stuff.  I have seen first hand the successful results of some of his link building efforts.