Doing link building is a hard and cost-intensive job – whereby costs can be man hours, pizzas or USD you waste, now matter what – you PAY for building links in the one or the other way.

The question is – where do you spend your link building resources on?

Lesson 1: Strongest Subpages suck

Just look at these stats below, of different pages I could get links on

These are pages of one site, the homepage and different sub pages – immediately you see that the homepage is of course a PR5, but getting a link on a better themed sub page would be much more beneficial, and more feasible. That site just doesn’t give us a homepage link.

But looking at all those sub pages we realize, they’ve got different cache dates and most importantly, only ONE sub page has external links on it which in turn MIGHT be a reason for it not getting supplemental. Well, with the right tools for checking if a page is supplemental we immediately notice that only the homepage is really juicy, i.e. is not supplemental and ranks for stuff it carries on.

Looking closer at that “Juice” column we also notice, that some of the subpages are indicated as DEAD – this means while they are cached, they don’t even rank for obscure and long terms found on the page.

Looking even closer at that “Juice” column we also notice that the ONLY page that has external links, and others, ranks for their stuff – together with TONs of other pages on the web… that means, they are duplicate content – and in fact lost the battle against other sites carrying the same content…

Now if I were Google, I would penalize those pages, too – duplicate content is a sure way to the supplemental index – or out of the active Google index at all finally…

In any case, NONE of the possible sub pages on that site are relevant for linking. Not even the “strongest subpage” as it’s spit out by Jim’s or SoloSEOs tool for finding the strongest subpage on a site (based on the number of links).

So, just pass this one on – move ahead.

Lesson 2: Paid Links suck

I’m sure you read all that yadda yadda about paid links, and Google “suddenly” saying paid links are evil just because they clarified their webmaster guidelines … In fact Matt Cutts & co spread the paid-link propaganda for at least THREE YEARs now (I might be wrong, maybe it’s four… not sure… but before that it was GoogleGuy, Matt’s alter ego)

Are paid links bad?

Yes, they are – if they are easily detected as such.

Just look at my browser toolbar for the next link prospect …

What do we see here? Ok – Apparently this site sucks anyway, because the juice indicator tells me it’s a dead meat page anyway, which means it doesn’t rank for ANYTHING (while being unique content! note that!)

But most important, we see that even my stupid little firefox toolbar understands that this site is part of the link inventory of Text Link Ads.

That is a paid link network.

Yes, one of the many paid link networks, and I definitely want to emphasize, that Patrick’s company Text-Link-Ads is the best link broker network on the market, first for being the first, second for being the biggest and third for being the company with the best business ethics one can think off.

BUT, it’s apparent that at least THIS site of the inventory is compromised. Any another of my secret inhouse tools (that I cannot give away, just because it’s my own competitive advantage PLUS eats a lot of resources once again) is able to identify this site as a Text-Link-Ads site.

And so Google’s engineers are able to detect this site as a “paid link site”. It might well be, that this is the reason this site ranks for nothing.. but that’s just pure speculation.

Again, no hate about TLA – they are just the biggest company, so it was easiest for me to find a sample site :-)

Summary: Where to really get links from

Obviously getting a link on the strongest subpage won’t help you much … at least not it all cases.

And neither will paid links help you if a little secret inhouse tool of CEMPER.COM will already display on the browser toolbar that the site you would buy a link from belongs to a link network.

What you need are

• links that you get/buy below the radar (of google & competitors)
• links on pages on established and trusted sites
• links on pages on those sites that pass juice and are not marked “paid link” or can be easily detected as such
• links within those pages content – if they are relevant to you… (else simply forget it – what do you want with german cooking content on a french plumbering site?)
• links that stay up – for a long time… don’t even think about “boosting your site” with a link to take that link away again some months later

What’s your take on links that work?