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Rustybrick is doing a great job of covering the SES conference over at seroundtable.com.  I thoroughly enjoyed reading the session about linking.  The panel is made up of Tim Mayer from Yahoo and Matt Cutts from Google. Most of what they are saying is what most of us know to be true anyways, but its nice to see them giving such clear answers in a public forum. http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002362.html

Here are a couple of the Q & A’s that really grabbed my eye.

Q & A with Matt Cutts of Google.

Q: When I do comparison across the engines of who is linking to me, I see differences between the two. His answer he got was that the link command isn’t full accurate.

A: Matt said that they used to show only important backlinks. But then someone suggested to show random samples of backlinks. They have never shown all backlinks. They do have all the backlinks at Google but they do not show them all.
Tim shows more backlinks then Google, they do not show all links but a more comprehensive link. The new system will “be very comprehensive” he wouldn’t say it is every link.
Kaushal said you would see a difference, because different engines filter spam and dups differently. Also not everything is exposed and each engine takes a slightly different approach.

Q: I have a client that has a great site, lots of links but the anchor text being used throughout the web is the same.
A: Matt said that is very unnatural. Most natural links are not 100% one exact phrase to the site. It won’t hurt you, there is no OOP, but all the links might be devalued.
Tim agreed with Matt on it being unnatural.

Q: Reciprocal links; we have them now, we have plans to do more, what should I do? There are 20 of them links.

A: Matt said here is my rule of thumb, pretend you are my competitor, what would they think of it? Plenty of people have reciprocal links but if its excessive, then you need to be careful. Editorial given links and independent links are best.
Danny then asked 4 people in the audience to point to each other and then asked several to point at each other.
Matt said if you go into “graph theory” you have a “clique”, that clique is when everyone in a network is pointing at each other, that is not natural.

Q: How do you know when too much is too much?

A: Tim said that is the hard question. It is all about “intent”.
Matt adds that if you take this to random 5 people outside of the SEO community, they would agree.

Q: Do none clickable links count as back links?

A: Matt said he has never been asked that, and he can see it both ways. Google has the code that they can flip the switch either way - but use the hyper link.
Tim said its best to get the hyper link.
Ask Jeeves said the same thing as Tim.

Q: PageRank; is it important or not? With the rel="nofollow” thing, if I cared about my PR, I would use nofollow on all my links to keep the PR within my sites. What are your thoughts? And is there a correlation between PR and number of pages indexed?

A: Most Webmasters say PR is not as important. Google has always said there are many variables in the algo and they keep evolving. Very few people outside of a search engine can say exactly how valuable a specific link is from a page. In Matt’s opinion, the nofollow has been a very valuable thing for the search engines. It gives the Webmaster the ability to say if I vouch for this link. So now we have this new type of data the search engines can use, he said its being used very responsibly. If you can authenticate or trust a comment poster, then there is no reason to use the nofollow.
Tim just repeats what Matt said.