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Link building being one of the most critical and indispensable tasks in current SEO, it is hardly a surprise that it’s also fraught with an inordinate pile of erroneous assumptions, disinformation, wayward misconceptions, sloppy thinking, gullibility, alarmism, and rumor mongering.

In short: downright superstition rules, and be it in its postmodern secular incarnation, pretending to be science or, at the very least, confusing mere assumptions with the statement of established facts.

Which it obviously isn’t once you seriously dig into it. Nor is this merely an academic issue, quite the contrary: there’s a staggering number of link building fallacies you had better stay clear of if you don’t want to run the risk of setting out on a risky, costly, possibly even devastating wild goose chase.

And no, to be a successful link builder you won’t need a degree in Information Technology or Computational Linguistics. Nor is it mandatory for you to spend days and weeks plodding through piles of cryptic, highly technical search engine patents even the savviest experts may have a very hard time understanding in all their implications.

Make no mistake: all of this can be and actually is immensely helpful, offering great insights and enabling us to reverse engineer a lot of what’s going on (or about to happen) in search. But this is neither the place not the proper occasion to discuss it.

Rather, simply try to get your act together in terms of maintaining a sober outlook and reviewing whatever’s being propagated out there in terms of link building advice with a very cold, hard eye.

And of course this applies to the following tips as much as to anybody else’s! Always use your own mind and check out your assumptions in a real life environment, i.e. test, test, test rather than relying on mere hearsay or whatever the current guru of the day may want to clobber you with.

Befuddled Concepts of the “Organic”

Let’s assume that search engines prefer a “natural” aka “organic” linking structure: one that doesn’t look “artificial” or “construed”. After all, it’s what Google and co. keep telling us all the time: to better serve them by pretending they’re not there in the first place. (No matter the illogical reasoning behind it: how could you pretend they don’t exist and want to serve them in the same stride? But that’s neither here nor there, of course. This is, after all, about business, and “clean” indices are what the search engines are pretending to build on. Oh well…)

So if that’s a reasonable assumption, the importance of getting the mix right cannot really be overstated if you want your inlinks to appear “natural” i.e. “organic” to avoid raising any suspicions (even the algorithmic kind). Put in mathematical terms, this would, in an ideal case scenario, essentially mean “chaotic”, i.e. not informed let alone dominated by any inherent patterns: truly organic links would come in an entirely random manner from all sorts of quarters.

Obviously, the Web as a whole may seem pretty chaotic, but equally obviously there’s innumerable “pockets” or “clusters” of bias that are anything but random. Of course sports sites will typically link to other sports sites, creating an undeniably focus.

But these clusters aren’t representative of the whole, either. And neither are they of necessity isolated. E.g. I might point/link to lots of sports sites from my blog merely to make fun of them, or to underline how ridiculous sports are, or to point out its inherent medical issues, etc. That wouldn’t make my blog a valid part of the “sportsphere” by any count – nor would it, to all probability, hurt them in any way as regards ranking.

Now if you go out on a link buying spree paying tons of money for “high PR links only”, as so many utterly clueless people are doing these days, guess what that gives you: “high PR links only” pointing to your site – now how “organic” or “realistic” is that? And what kind of a discernible (i.e. easy to penalize!) link building footprint does it create?

Rather, to keep it as “organic” (i.e. “near-chaotic”) as possible, you may actually need at least some of those despised “low value” links! Not too many of them, perhaps (whatever that may mean in tangible numbers – this is where all you can reasonably go by is trial and error, as frustrating as it may seem…), and probably not so much for their actual “link juice” perhaps, but very possibly in terms of plausibility.

And again: provided our basic assumption (and that’s all it really is at this stage) is correct, it’s about the mix, and certainly not about those spectacular “maverick links” you’d like to brag with! (”Black hat” SEOs, incidentally, have known this all along…)

The “Topical Sites” Fallacy: Confusing “Authority” With “Focus”

There’s a prevailing predilection amongst current link buyers that has spawned an entire cottage industry of brokers and link vendors, needlessly diverting all sorts of energies and resources into its specific version of an SEO dead end street: namely the concept that links on “topical, focused sites” are somehow of superior value.

This is, to put it blandly, utter nonsense: there’s absolutely no proof that any of the major search engines categorizes entire web sites in terms of “topics” or “themes”.

Thus, it’s a pathetic waste of resources to adopt some version of the common “put sports related links only on sports related sites yadda yadda” type of policy.

Web pages (as opposed to web sites) are another matter – to an extent. (No point in overrating that part either…) For example, sports links on a baby food site may (but definitely not: must!) have slightly less value (dubious but at least arguable), but that’s about where it ends. The reason for this (possibly) being that individual page focus will actually be determined: vide contextual advertising mechanisms such as AdSense.

But confusing “authority” with “topical focus” is just one of so many other fallacies dominating the link building industry.

To be continued.

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