Bing On Links: You Should Never Know In Advance Where A Link Is Coming From

Duane Forrester from Microsoft’s Bing team wrote a blog post today on the official Bing Search blog named 10 SEO myths reviewed. There are many good and obvious points Duane makes in the post but one point he makes about links is very revealing. Duane wrote: You should never know in advance a link is […]

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Duane Forrester from Microsoft’s Bing team wrote a blog post today on the official Bing Search blog named 10 SEO myths reviewed. There are many good and obvious points Duane makes in the post but one point he makes about links is very revealing.

Duane wrote:

You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from. If you do, that’s the wrong path.

That obviously means you should not buy links, but it also goes as far as saying that you shouldn’t ask other webmasters to link to you. You shouldn’t do any action at all, that you know, for a fact, will lead to you getting a link from a source.

Technically, if you know that emailing me a story about search topics will lead to you getting a link in our daily SearchCap, that seems like it would be going against what Bing’s Senior Product Manager is saying is allowed.

Or maybe I am looking too much into what Bing wrote?


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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