Link Week Loose Ends

My Link Week columns rotate every other week, and over the course of the last few columns several questions and comments have been sent my way.  For this week’s column, I’m responding to a selection of those questions and comments.

From my column Is This Link Building RFP A No-Win?

First, here’s the exact email response/question I sent to the person who sent me the RFP.

Thanks for your interest.  If you are serious, it means you feel you will make more money than the $100,000 you say you are willing to pay me to do this for you.  So let me ask you one question.  If I could take a brand new domain/URL and get it ranked in the top five for “Christmas Gifts” in less than 21 days, why would I do that for your site and hope you send me the $100K, when I could launch my own new domain/URL, link it, rank it, and make more than $100K?

I never got a reply. My feeling is that the project was real and was being pitched by someone who had more money than sense, or who was hoping to find a link builder who is bad at math. Aside from that, looking at this purely from a “can it be done?” perspective, in my opinion it is impossible to rank a new site in the top five in 20 days for the term Christmas Gifts.  Well, maybe at Kumo.

From my column Beyond Link Building Tools, I used the analogy of identical quintuplets as a way of explaining how competing sites that are nearly identical and choose to remain that way are destined to end up with a nearly identical inbound link profiles. Even so, search engine rankings don’t allow for a tie, and must rank sites –even identical sites– according to some signal. And just as the quintuplets are unique in certain ways, the site with a unique difference that engenders unique links will be the one that wins.

From my column Link Building for Big Old Sites, I wrote the column on September 16, 2008. About a month later Google announced Webmaster Tools shows Crawl error sources. The timing was purely by coincidence, but don’t underestimate the value of the 404 referrer data Google will show you.  I’ve been able to reclaim almost all of the 10 dead links Google alerted me to.  My site is small so this was not a long process.  It took a couple hours and a few emails over the course of a few days.  I can’t help but wonder though, for the biggest sites, which often have hundreds of dead links, will there one day be a person with the title Link Reclamation Manager?

Editor’s Note: This is a holiday bonus edition of Link Week, which normally only runs on Tuesdays. Enjoy!