Over the past few days, I’ve been watching a few videos from the Whiteboard Friday collection that the crew at SEOmoz has available at their Vimeo site. By “a few videos,” I mean a few hours’ worth of videos. Sounds trying, but Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz does a great job explaining SEO in a way that makes these videos fly by without compromising helpful information.

Today, I watched one of the most helpful so far: “Dude, your links kinda suck.” Rand introduced four kinds of links and, if you need to troubleshoot some SEO problems, checking your links would be a great place to start. While the quality and trust of sites that link to you are immensely important, the origin of these links can sometimes be overlooked.

As I mentioned, he breaks links up into four categories: spam, low quality, good quality, and awesome stuff.

1. Spam

• Comment spam:
  Leaving comments manually or with a bot on other blogs and websites.
• Guestbook spam:
  Similar to comment spam, but a bit outdated.
• Link farms:
  Creating a number of websites with the sole purpose of linking back.

2. Low quality (most common)

• Bad directories
• Forum signatures
• Social media profiles:
  This references spamming other people’s social profiles. Sharing relevant links using a company profile leans more toward the average quality link.
• Sites you own:
  Search engines see this as a cousin to link farms.
• Reciprocal links
• Link trading

3. Good quality

• Partners:
  Develop partnerships with relevant sources
• Blogrolls
• Good directories:
  Yahoo! Directory, government sites, etc.

4. Awesome Stuff

• Editorial content:
  Inside the content frame of a page. Guest blogging is a great way to achieve these links.
• Badges/widgets
• Industry news leader blogs

Of course, the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. Work on your website to keep information relevant and current. Share that information with industry leaders. Develop a relationship with those leaders. Good things also take time; don’t expect overnight results. Just remember, if it were easy, everyone would be at the top of search engines.

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