wheel - 2:32 pm on Feb 11, 2010 (gmt 0)

I didn't do much link building yesterday, I'm always busy with other stuff. However, out of the three emails I've sent, one didn't respond - not surprised. The second didn't respond - I am surprised. The third emailed me today to say they've passed it on to the person who handles the links on their site (and thanked me). They're an org. charged by the gov't with regulating the technical aspects of my industry. To reuse the mortgage example, it would the be org who regulates mortgage brokers, if there is such a thing.

Two comments. If the glass is half empty, I had to email 3 people and only have a 33% success rate. But that's not the case. What it really is is that I'm going to get a huge authority link. I repeat a bunch of times, and all of a sudden I have 10,20,50 of these links. Then my competitors think Dang! how did he get 50 authority links. Well, I asked 150 people.

Secondly, I can assure you that this org. has better things to do than scour the internet looking for great content to link to. They set up the link page years ago and don't touch it. So even if you have great content, they are NEVER going to find you and link to you. But I asked - and that makes my chance of success 100% better than not asking. That's why I tend to disagree with the folks who suggest that if you just build good content, links will come. Maybe (they don't for me) but the come a lot faster and better if you seek them out deliberately.

Today at the very least I'll be calling the regulatory authority in the US to ask them for a link (calling, not emailing). I've gotten a link from them in the past, that other site is the only commercial site they link to. It's the equivalent of a rinky dink mortgage broker site, and they link to it, because of great content AND I asked. Neither one individually would have worked.

My site: command on google now reads over 70 pages indexed, though it is still showing only the original 20-30 pages. (i.e. it says 1-75 pages, but if you click through it only displays the original pages. So it's definitely crawling, just not completed the indexing just yet). I'm anxious for this stuff to hit, I'm hoping for a lot of long tail traffic.