I don’t for the life of me remember EXACTLY how I came across Mike and Troy’s “Feeding The Panda“, but I can tell you this; I’m darn glad I did.

I do, of course, remember that I was looking for a credible search engine optimization (SEO) discussion that was written AFTER Google’s Panda update, which as you know, pretty much changed the rules of the SEO game. Additionally, some of my sites had been hit pretty hard by the Panda update, and – since I have always been 100% focused on creating superlative quality content to keep both Google and my audience happy – I was less than happy with the demotion.

Yeah, yeah I know; lots of people say they create great quality content, but when you check it out for yourself, you’ll find that’s not the case. However, that  very definitely was the case here; the material on my UltimateFatBurner.com site, for example, is meticulously researched, unique, and well written. Check out a couple of examples for yourself and be the judge; here, here and here!

Of course, I found lots of PRE-Panda SEO stuff, as well as material that I could not ascribe a date to, so it was impossible to assess how credible it continued to be, early 2011.

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Every time the engineers over at Google pull a couple of the levers here and push a few buttons there to make changes to their ranking algorithms, the inevitable outcry ensues…

Google has become too big for its britches.  Google thinks its “owns” the Internet. Google is striking out against SEO professionals and all the hard-working folks who rely on a certain volume of traffic to sustain their businesses. And so on, and so on, and so on.

It happens every single freakin’ time. You can pretty much set your watch by it; the outrage, the outcry, the contempt.

And for the life of me, I can’t understand why.

First of all…

Every single “enraged” webmaster needs to give his (or her) head a good, swift shake. Google is not in business to make you money. They are not in business to make me money. They do not owe you or I a living. They do what they do to increase the value of the company for its shareholders.

That’s it, that’s all. Get over it.

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If you haven’t heard, Google has been working on a serious revamping of its search infrastructure (it may have officially launched by the time you read this) which it is calling Caffeine. In webmaster’s circles, this has upcoming revision has caused some major consternation and hand wringing; what happens if Google significantly changes its algorithym and rankings fall? What if they begin to penalize in-pointing links? What if this, and what if that?

Yawn.

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Less than 10 years ago, it was “on-page” elements that were the major contributing factor to top Search Engine (SE) rankings. These included keyword density (how often did your keywords appear in the page’s text, anchor text and critical <TITLE> and <META> tags, etc) as well as keyword prominence (i.e., where on the page your keywords appears), and numerous other factors.

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Sigh.

Here I am, talking about link building again. It seems like every second article is about link building in one  form or another. Nevertheless, link building is a vital element of SEO, especially for relatively new sites. So it has to be talked about (if you’re familiar with my articles, perhaps you’ve already read my “linking fundamentals” article. If not, you’ll probably want to review it now).

To recap my “take” on link building; the most important element of any successful campaign is to begin with a web site of exceptional quality and sufficient depth of material. If you don’t have this, you need to take a link building chill pill.

If you’ve got this in place, you’re ready to investigate strategies to build up your in-pointing links.

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It happened again.

Someone sent me a reciprocal link exchange request for a site in an obvious “under construction” state. It was a web site definitely NOT ready for links.

I’m at a bit of a loss as to why this happens so much.

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You want traffic? You gotta have in-pointing links. Rankings in the dumps? You need more links. Sales on a downward spiral? Beg, buy, borrow, or steal some links.

It’s pretty much the online marketing mantra.

Links, links, links. It’s enough to drive you crazy. And of course, every online marketing expert on the planet has an opinion; here’s what YOU need to do to get the links you require. Others have software tools to help you accomplish your link building goals. You’ll need to pay for those, of course.

With all the commotion, I figured it was a good time to get back to the fundamentals and examine exactly why it is that you need links, and what you should be doing to get them.

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