A guide on proper link building?

[onlinesource]

Are there any websites that discuss link building and how to improve ranking for particular keywords. I read a lot of stuff online that was posted back in 2008 and Google is every changing.

These days, I read a lot of stuff... people say that your anchor text needs to display your domain. Like, if your site is bigtimeshirt.biz and you want to rank for "custom shirts", you'd go with "custom shirts bigtimeshirt.biz". Others tell me that is not true, that "custom shirts" simply needs to point to bigtimeshirt.biz.

A lot of other people tell me that link building means nothing. That all Google wants is a site with nice rich content and a good social media campaign.

I sort of believe the content and social media part, but then again a lot of my competitors don't even have Facebook or Google+ pages, haven't updated their site in ages, and content is lacking with sites that are like 8 to 10 pages deep at the most. Still, they destroy me.

I continue to write good content on my site and post to Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc. The only thing I'm not doing is link building because it's so hard to find places that will link to you. A lot of people try message boards, forums or blog comments but most of those block external links.

For the longest time, I thought toxic links were holding me back from ranking for any external links or ranking in general. Back in November, I was running at 50% toxic which was awful. After numerous disavows, that number is down to 5% or 44 toxic links. Still, when I pull up a list of healthy (not even suspicious) links there are very few... 48 (more than toxic though).

Out of the healthy, the anchor text is like my domain or CLICK HERE or VIEW SITE.

I really need help on getting anchor rich back links, unless Google is stepping away from that.

[onlinesource]

What about submitting RSS feed to RSS feed directory. I notice today that a blog which has a link to my site, has had their feed submitted to a rss directory. Now that directory's website is showing the post with my link in the feed, but the link coming from the directory site is being listed as toxic. BUT the link coming from my actual blog is not.

[wheel]

I recently built 30+ links to a commercial site. Large, commercial organization (300 employees in my country, and 2 dozen business locations internationally) in an industry filthy with affiliates, uber competitive. You simply 'cannot' get links to a site like this without paying. There's no natural sites that talk about this or link unsolicited. They're all affiliate or blog/ad sites.

1 and 2 - BOTW and Yahoo directory.
3 - university sponsored community event, sponsored page on university website.
4 and 5 - called two friends with sites in the industry.
6 - government business directory. They're free, and they exist.
7-14 - top quality membership driven business directories in the industry. Chamber of commerce quality, but industry specific and national orgs.
15 - a link building promotion someone was doing (actually it was called "industry" month), where we do a post on a topic, and get a link from the main site. The main site (guy's a genius) gets links from the media as the guy who organized 'industry' month and got 200 participating websites to write a post on something boring and commercial.
16 - a more general industry directory but I liked the domain name.
17 - the president of the company has a technical designation. Got a link from the main site that hands out the tech. designation. For example, lets say the president was a credentialled engineer. I went to the society of credentialled engineers and got a listing from their site under the section 'employers that hire engineers'. (note, the site has nothing to do with engineers, just an example).
18-20- 17 gave me an idea, and I did a search on '{region} employers'. Got a listing from 3 more sites that list local employers.
21-30 - paid blog posts. I used Postjoint, if we're allowed to name names. I'm not affiliated.
31-32 - also blog posts, but I didn't write content. Instead, I did old school 'resource list' and built a page of links to publish on a blog. One site was 'here's links to cool sites in the industry' and the other was 'links to websites and apps in the industry'. Very different, touches of old school link pages.

There's 30+ links in an industry where there's no such thing as a natural link. Others may argue, I think those 30_ links are all reasonably good quality. A few are darn good quality.

>>Are there any websites that discuss link building

Well, there's a bunch of examples for you right there.

>>A lot of other people tell me that link building means nothing.
These people are wrong.

>>That all Google wants is a site with nice rich content and a good social media campaign.

Google doesn't know what Google wants. But sites rank due to links, not rich content and social media. Try Googling 'new york hotels' or 'cheap airfares' and tell me how many sites are ranking with rich content and social media campaigns.

[onlinesource]

Would you be against creating your own corporate blog to push traffic to your main site? I noticed that Bed Bath & Beyond has blog.BB&B or [goo.gl...] The site is filled with lots of fun articles like "Fun stuff to do with your kids during the summer". Maybe 50% of the articles link to other domains but almost all of the articles, link to products on BB&B like "red lanterns" which links to the red lantern product page on BB&B.com. How is that not abusive or spammy? Does Google not penalize them because .blog even though it is a subdomain is still apart of the BB&B system? Or is BB&B so respected that they can get away with it?

I understand about Google respecting some directories like BOTW and Yahoo. I even agree with the benefits of getting backlinks on educational sites. Unless it's a paid server to get a link, it's difficult talking people into linking to you. I will consider your suggestions though.

Thanks.

[webmarketingxpert]

The ultimate way to get success with Google preferring the link building for a website is to have a mixture of the types and ways links are built. Direct linking of the anchor text is good but it should be used least. Try building all types of backlinks i.e.
dofollow and nofollow as well and then
URL based like example.com, www.example.com, http://example.com then
name based 'example' or using keywords with the name like 'the example site example.com' or 'the example site www.example.com and etc.

Focus on building the contextual links or content based backlinks more, emphasizing high on quality of the content which means making it worth to read. Links within such webpages are very valuable.

There are more ways. It is very important to understand that your strategy of building links must appear natural to Google so you must avoid:
bulk link building,
building links every day,
targeting certain number of link building in a week or a month

The reason of Matt Cutts statement against Guest Blogging was mainly targeted towards the unusual and unnatural practice. You must prove yourself first the reason of a backlink.

Hope it helps.

Thanks

[martinibuster]

>>A lot of other people tell me that link building means nothing.
These people are wrong.

I agree.

Of the people who have stated that link building is dying or less important, speaking only of those whose sites I am familiar with, because I know how they were promoted, I have to say that their statements are true only insofar as that their methods were low quality to begin with. Either they are unaware that their link building was low quality or they are being untruthful.

I am not saying that everyone who says link building matters less is a low quality link builder. My observation is limited to those whose link building I am familiar with. Naturally if your link building is low quality then from where you sit it's going to appear as if link building counts for less. But that's a matter of perspective, an opinion that has been shaped by an experience shaped by less than optimal link strategy.

[Crush]

I have a friend in a very competitive industry who always survives. His back link network comprises of sites that cost a min of 500$ to purchase from auctions. No one comes close to beating this guy. I guess his back link network is worth 200K but the lesson is here that it emulates what google wants. You need only powerful links now, forget the crap.