An Authority “Non-Content” Audit — Mike King / iPullRank

Quotes

• “Its really about attracting more higher quality links and were very high-minded about link building when we talk about it but when it comes to the actual practice, its not that interesting. It is actually very similar to doing outbound sales.” -Mike

• “Everything that I hear from SEOs is, links dont matter anymore. Google is great at natural language processing, they areable to get down to not necessarily the domain, not necessarily the page but the individual passage, paragraph, and they are pulling more content out and understanding how to answers the users questions, provide them with the right content which means that the link is less important.” -Ben

• “I think that as SEOs we have over-indexed on link-building because of the fact that we know that it has to be the thing and that if you do a bunch of that, you can rank but the reality is if you have content that isbetter optimized, you need fewer links.” -Mike

• “You can have a different combination of good content and good links or bad links and good content, or great links and mediocre content, and effectively achieve the same result because ultimately Google is scoring pages based on these different factors.” -Mike

• “In my experience, everything works. Everything from terrible blog comment links to form spam, Ive seen all of that be effective but not sustainable. The things that I found sustainable are creatinggreat content, reaching out to people, and getting them to link to it.” -Mike

• “So I do this all the time, and Im the seller, not the buyer. I run a marketing podcast, we have people that are sponsoring our podcast, they come on to the show, they pay tobe interviewed and the product of being a high-profile guest on the show is, advertising, my never-ending love, and affection but also we create a page for them that links back to their domain, is that a bought link? It seems like an SOP for me.” -Ben

• “Thats what I am saying. We are so high-minded as an industry about link-building but in practice, its not the way that we talk about. It is like you just described. Brands doing partners and the by-products of those partnerships often being link. So, how is Google even to police that.” -Mike

• “Trouble is when it comes down to buying links and doing things like link widgets and so on. That was a really popular tactic. So, you have a widget that can be embedded and you then have control over the anchor text and the embed code. If youre going to do that, make sure there is no anchor text at all. Its been proven that it is going to be more effective.” -Mike

• “Also, anything that you do some sort of contest and people has to link to you to have an entry tothe contest, that was something that I used to do and I thought it was a good idea but its something that Ive gone away from because it can be seen as sort of a scheme.” -Mike

• “They key in on this idea of building links from a passive resource. A lot of this tactic is you create an interactive of some sort just like the state of a thing. What ends up happening is, we have anything like that or original research that you make then rank pretty well for queries surrounding that. When journalists or whoever is writing about that subject, they end up finding it doing their own research and end up linking to it because they found it.” -Mike

• “Whatever you do in social media also influences this as well, like you building up your follower base but its alsothrough creating great content. Its also the things that you do with your brand as well and not just your personal brand but the companys brand as well to get it out there and create more of that influence.” -Mike

• “You cant think of link-building as an isolated thing. It has to be a part of a bigger marketing mix because anything you do can drive those links.” -Mike