Discover the Power of Linking

Sasi Parthasarathy

Program Manager, Microsoft

Ask Live Search

• Our position is straight forward – it is not

the technique that we are concerned

about, it is the intention

How to perceive “Link Building”

• Your chance to build reputation on the web

• Your website is your asset – link building is an asset building

exercise

• Link building is a long term commitment – invest over time

• Don’t expect results overnight

Key to Link Building

• Content is King

• Providing high-quality content on your pages is the

single most important thing you should do to attract good

links. If your content is unique/useful, your site will attract

visitors and automatically get good links to your site

• By focusing on great content, over time, your site will

acquire good links naturally

Links from authority sites

• Get links from “high quality” sites that are “authorities” or

experts in your field

• We know everything about the sites linking to you, and if they are

authoritative sources in your field and they link to you, then you are

likely a valuable source of information and highly relevant in your

field.

• Example: If you are building a web-site for feline care, it would be

highly desirable to get a link from http://www.catvets.com/ - site for

American Association of Feline Practitioners

Links from related sites

• Do the sites that link to you relate to your content?

• If you have a site selling furniture, a link from a hair salon will not be

of much benefit. We look for content relationship when determining

the value of a link. The value of links might vary based on how

related the content of the two sites is.

• Focus on attaining links from sites relevant to your own.

Link building – What is unnatural?

• Anything done with the intent to rank higher by manipulating the

search engine will be perceived as spam

• We want the best content for the user for a given query. Anything

done to disrupt this effort will be neutralized and even punished

• Examples:

1. If the number of links to your site increase from 100 to 10000 in a week, it might

be perceived unnatural and warrant closer review

2. If we see bunch of your links are from blog comments and/or from sites

irrelevant to you, it would warrant a closer review

3. Don’t use hidden links

4. Having tons of artificial (and irrelevant) links gotten through paid link farms or

exchanges will get your penalized

5. Linking out extensively to known web spam sites will hurt you

Link Analysis with Live Search Webmaster Tools

Link Analysis - Live Search Webmaster Tools

• Look at your in-links and out-links for spam sites

and malware-infected sites

• Look who is linking to you and who you link to

and see how reputable they are as perceived by

us (look at the page score for reference)

• If you get links from popular news sites, look for

the writers who talk about you and link to you –

now you know who to talk to the next time you

have interesting content on your site

Miscellaneous Tips

• Submit your site to search engines so that we can crawl

you

• Make security your priority when you start blogs, forums

and message boards

• Links are one of the indicators but not the only indicator

Good Luck