The future of link building will focus less on manipulating links and more on creating valuable content and building genuine relationships. Traditional link building tactics like unnatural links, spammy guest blogging, and exploiting directories have been disrupted and are no longer effective. Instead, link builders should aim to engage audiences, measure the influence of links based on engaged visitors rather than sheer volume, and find ways to contribute value through their expertise, networks, and content.

1. The future of link building
WILL CRITCHLOW

2. Here are the kinds of things
we’ve seen today

3. @hannah_bo_banna

4. Psychographic
Online
Mass
Publishing

5. Info vs plain graphic

6. Much of What Makes Leaders Great Also Makes Them Great Marketers
Via the White House Flickr Feed: http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/8191317327/ - Inbound marketing in

7. Where did my “submit link” button go?

8. Links are dead
I want to make it 100% clear that this is not what I am saying

9. Links are dead
If you tweet that I said this, I will hunt you down

10. It’s link building that is in trouble
I’ve been answering SEOmoz Q&A
since it looked like this

All the answers to “why don’t I
rank?” used to be “you need more
links”.
Now?

11. Dear GOD.
Not those links

12. I’m not here on a moral crusade
I just happen to prefer flywheels over explosive unsustainable growth

13. …and I’m not risk averse
I have invested in all kinds of risky things (defined as “things that might not work”)

14. This is the last linklove

15. The future of link
builders

16. There’s a bigger problem

17. We broke directories
They used to be the best way of finding great things on the web

18. We broke comments
Now we all have to run akismet

19. We broke forums
Many legitimate forums and communities closed under the onslaught of forum spam

20. We took a 150-year-old form of communication
“Distribution of the slave population of the United States”, 1861

23. As practiced by respected newspapers
“The Ebb and Flow of Movies”, 2008

24. And ruined it
Thanks @ChrisLDyson

25. Try to make the design support the data
Please tell me this was a joke

26. Incidentally, a good use of Pinterest
Maybe the only one I’ve found yet - http://pinterest.com/scottcowley/ugly-infographics/

27. Guest columns have existed forever
Does your process look like this? Please tell me no. [Hat-tip Carson Ward]

28. We can’t even clean up after ourselves
Without hacking people off

29. information tied to verified online
profiles will be ranked higher than
content without such verification
Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google

30. You think:
“how can I game that”

31. There’s an even bigger problem

32. Ad agencies are better than us
Honda Cog

33. Artists are better than us
OK Go

34. Celebrities are better than us
@ladygaga

35. Celebrities are better than us
@willcritchlow

36. Brands are better than us
Red Bull has videos of pigeons doing backflips

37. Loss leaders are hard to compete with
Snow Fall – How they made it

38. STOP

41. Stop worrying about
your hosting IP
address

42. Start worrying about CDNs, edge
nodes and site speed

43. Stop worrying about
linking
C-blocks

44. Start worrying about how many
journalists you have in your address
book

45. Stop worrying about
anchor text

46. Start worrying about being misquoted

47. Stop worrying about
nofollow

48. Start worrying whether anyone will
click

49. Stop calling it link
juice

50. For the love of
GOD
stop calling it
link juice

51. Link equity plays much better in the
board room

52. The future of link
builders

56. Hire the right VP Marketing or you’ll
just end up with a bunch of blue pens
with your logo on them

58. We understand amplification
From Thomas Baekdal

59. If you aren’t naturally technical
Start here – incredible deck from Jamie @ SEOmoz

60. Earn attention instead of shares

61. Measure links based on engaged visitors
I made you a custom report and advanced segments for non-bounces and >2 pages

62. Engage spidey sense

63. We can instantly tell Mom & Pop from Thin Affiliate

64. We know why no-one is linking to you
Your site is ugly, your content sucks, no-one knows who you are

65. We know how influential a person is
Haha. Just kidding.

66. Power searching
We can find out who people are, where they write, what they own

67. Homework time

68. Inspired by Entrepreneurial Design
By Gary Chou of USV - Course here and blog post write-up here

69. Make yourself uncomfortable

70. = 1 hour or less
See
here
= an afternoon
= day or more

71. Not extrovert?

72. Get a journalist to run a story based on your tip
Call 3 journalists & tell them you thought they’d be interested in a story you found online

73. Present to a crowd of 200+ people
See Justin Briggs’ explanation of how

74. Present to a board
Bonus points for getting shouted at

75. Negotiate with a salesperson
Get more than 10% off retail price of something (doesn’t have to be a car!)

76. Record a screencast or webinar
Get it watched by more than 20 people. Camtasia / Google+ Hangouts on air

77. Reach out to
a hero
get an answer

78. Visit a newsroom

79. Debate a business case
With 3+ colleagues who you don’t normally work with. We have enjoyed 2078 & 4168

80. Sell something door to door
Don’t want to go outside? Make 10 cold calls

81. Run a live usability test
Offer to buy a stranger a coffee. Resist the urge to coach them

82. Answer 3 customer calls

83. and website instant chat
I highly recommend olark.com

84. Read to a child
In some ways, they’re an easy audience. In others…

85. Not technical?

86. Install a web server
I’d start with Apache. Send enough traffic that it breaks. Fix it.

87. Build a web crawler
Crawl 10,000 pages. Discover how little of the web is nicely-formatted HTML

88. Search through some log files
Find 3 crawlers on your site that aren’t googlebot, slurp or bingbot

89. Build a tool

90. Contribute to an open source
project
Github makes some parts of this really easy. The hard part is working out git

91. Make something and sell a copy online

92. Work out who someone anonymous is

93. Run a conversion rate test end to end
I recommend Optimizely. Don’t worry if you don’t get significant results

94. Install and play with r
Take some Google Analytics data and strip seasonality

95. Not creative?

96. Film and edit some video
Phone camera. iMovie / Premiere Elements. Lower third. Cut a scene. Improve audio.

97. Make a graphic
Get 20 shares

98. Make an interactive graphic

99. Build a wireframe
Try Balsamiq. If you can’t think of anything, rework distilled.net homepage & send me it

100. Remove
someone
from a
photo
Before After

101. Rewrite / redesign a landing page
Cheri Percy wrote about our own conversion rate trials and tribulations

102. Write for a publication you’ve previously bought
Bonus points for calling yourself a “published author”

104. Thanks.
WILL CRITCHLOW
will.critchlow@distilled.net
@willcritchlow

105. Image credits
http://www.flickr.com/photos/seandreilinger/440479819/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cabbit/5443790000/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ballookey/265114990/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/latzko/6928444437/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/theseanster93/5027792986/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/timriley/246432530/
http://maddieonthings.com/post/45025427385/austin-tx-sxsw
http://www.flickr.com/photos/johngreenaway/3356358479/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/99411713@N00/6170567978/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mulmatsherm/2221223106/
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/New_York_Stock_Exchange_Boardroom_-_New_York_-_Flickr_-_hyku_(3).jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wrherndon/4630505899/
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Al_Jazeera_English_Newsroom.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jfraissi/3710938389/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alreadytaken/1338047903/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rcpl/5125999205/
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d2/TrakAxPC_Video_Editing_Software_Screenshot.png/1024px-
TrakAxPC_Video_Editing_Software_Screenshot.png
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsmagic/3300485968/
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Seattle_Ugly_Mug_02.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/quinnanya/2596039804/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hugosimmelink/1505553447/