Outspoken Media just interviewed 11 famous SEO experts to answer 11 great questions about link building. We saw that Dori had gone through and answered these link building questions on her blog, so we thought we’d do the same. We hope you find these answers useful to your own link building campaigns.

1) What are a few emerging link tactics that you’ve seen in the past 12 months providing tremendous value to sites/pages? Can you give a specific example or two?

I haven’t found any new link tactics in the past 12 months that provide tremendous value. All the great tactics that truly provide tremendous value have been around for a while.

2) The SEO industry has become so stingy with linking to quality content to the point that many people who used to share a lot of it simply don’t bother, as it is not worth the cost of doing so. Is this a trend which spreads? Are we canaries in the coal mine, or is this just an issue impacting the SEO niche because it is far too saturated? What can Google do to encourage organic linking on the WWW (outside of nepotism, hype, spin, misinformation & ego-baiting)?

We don’t like to look greedy, so we don’t perform the stingy acts on our company web site. However the reason we created SpyderMate initially was as a linkbait tool. So for SpyderMate we don’t freely post external links. We feel it’s justified there however because we are offering a free and very useful service to the community.

3) What are the criteria for the “perfect link”?

The perfect link has the following attributes:

a) High authority domain & page
b) Minimal amount of external links on same page
c) Web site is very relevant to yours
d) The anchor text matches a keyword you are battling for
e) It’s located within the obvious content section of the web page
f) obviously it’s not tagged rel=”nofollow”

4) How do you go about creating a link marketing plan that will A:) Get tangible search results in a 6 to 12 month period and B:) Create sustainability for the website you are creating the plan for (i.e. keeping the links clean and adding links with long term value)

Well first you find out what keywords they should be targeting. Then you go through all their competitors ranking  for the keyword phrases and scour all their backlinks. Once you make sure you got a link from every backlink they have possible then you move on. Next you target the more lower hanging fruit longtail keywords through your list of standard directories that you submit to. This helps re-enforce your short-tail keywords with long tail variation power. After this you go for the seriously powerful links. These are your premium directory listings, your serious linkbait web sites and your powerful friend’s web sites. These sites target the more generic short-tail keywords that help raise all your longtails associated around them. The maintain sustainability you consistently create great new content and linkbait to create a consistent flow of natural inbound, quality, relevant links.

5) If you could choose a link on a lower authority page that would provide a moderate amount of targeted traffic or a link on a higher authority page that would provide absolutely no traffic – all other attributes being equal – for ranking benefits on the site you’re developing links for, which would you choose and why?

This depends entirely on how relevant and how well converting the lower authority page would be. It also depends on current rankings, whether or not there is a keyword I could boost my rankings for that would beat the conversions coming directly from this link. So if i had a site with a low conversion rate that had a high payout I would go with the lower authority link. If I had a site with a high conversion rate and a lower average payout I’d go with the high authority link.

6) Do you feel that you can conserve pagerank or that it’s still worth the effort to sculpt your links, by limiting the number of links on a page, creating them with JavaScript, passing them through a blocked page or using nofollow?

I believe you can, but also don’t believe it’s worth the effort, especially on a site that you’re constantly updating. There are other tasks you can spend your valuable time on that provide more value to your web presence.

7) Please discuss what link deprecation is and what impact it may have on a link building campaign.

I believe link deprecation to be the result of poorly built links primarily. The only reason this should occur is due to the age of the links. Actually losing links only happens to links that were easily attained and therefore easily lost. The best links are very hard to come by and last the test of time.

8) Do you think search engines are trying to find a way to depend less on link popularity and more on other algorithmic/social media factors?

I believe they are, but I don’t think it plays much of a role currently. I also think basing searches on social media is not viable for many categories of web sites. The fact that social media sites like Facebook are social make your likes inherently based around your friend’s general interests as well as your own. Even though I’m heavily interested in SEO, it does not mean I’m going to bother liking SEO articles I find interesting left and right because I know it will annoy my friends. I want to share things that I know my friends will also be interested in. This is not a system that a true search engine can be built upon. A search engine can however leverage this information is done on the right level.

9) How much do you stress internal linking on your own or clients’ sites? Do you have a quick rule of thumb or strategy to maximize the effectiveness of internal links?

I’ve found that emphasizing your traffic generating pages through inbound links is critical. Using carefully placed inbound links to associate relevant topics and re-emphasize targeted anchor text is extremely helpful, especially for that highest level page in the link scheme. Enough said.

10) What’s a successful link development strategy many overlook or dismiss?

Linkbait. People tend to dismiss serious linkbait strategies because of the time/costs associated with them. They tend to think other efforts are easier, but nothing generates those truly unique, critical, powerful links like well done linkbait.

11)  What have you been most WRONG about over the course of your link building/SEO career?

I was most wrong about how effective thousands of links coming from the same authoritative web site, with different anchor text, coming from different pages, linking to different pages were at lifting my rankings. Domain diversity is absolutely crucial. I’ve learned that one great warrior is better than thousands of mediocre warriors.