Sasi Parthasarathy, Program Manager for Live Search at Microsoft talks about how search engines rely on link analysis as an important component for rank web pages at SES NY.

1. Discover the Power of Linking
Sasi Parthasarathy
Program Manager, Microsoft

2. Ask Live Search
• Our position is straight forward – it is not
the technique that we are concerned
about, it is the intention

3. How to perceive “Link Building”
• Your chance to build reputation on the web
• Your website is your asset – link building is an asset building
exercise
• Link building is a long term commitment – invest over time
• Don’t expect results overnight

4. Key to Link Building
• Content is King
• Providing high-quality content on your pages is the
single most important thing you should do to attract good
links. If your content is unique/useful, your site will attract
visitors and automatically get good links to your site
• By focusing on great content, over time, your site will
acquire good links naturally

5. Links from authority sites
• Get links from “high quality” sites that are “authorities” or
experts in your field
• We know everything about the sites linking to you, and if they are
authoritative sources in your field and they link to you, then you are
likely a valuable source of information and highly relevant in your
field.
• Example: If you are building a web-site for feline care, it would be
highly desirable to get a link from http://www.catvets.com/ - site for
American Association of Feline Practitioners

6. Links from related sites
• Do the sites that link to you relate to your content?
• If you have a site selling furniture, a link from a hair salon will not be
of much benefit. We look for content relationship when determining
the value of a link. The value of links might vary based on how
related the content of the two sites is.
• Focus on attaining links from sites relevant to your own.

7. Link building – What is unnatural?
• Anything done with the intent to rank higher by manipulating the
search engine will be perceived as spam
• We want the best content for the user for a given query. Anything
done to disrupt this effort will be neutralized and even punished
• Examples:
1. If the number of links to your site increase from 100 to 10000 in a week, it might
be perceived unnatural and warrant closer review
2. If we see bunch of your links are from blog comments and/or from sites
irrelevant to you, it would warrant a closer review
Don’t use hidden links
3.
4. Having tons of artificial (and irrelevant) links gotten through paid link farms or
exchanges will get your penalized
5. Linking out extensively to known web spam sites will hurt you

8. Link Analysis with Live Search Webmaster Tools

9. Link Analysis - Live Search Webmaster Tools
• Look at your in-links and out-links for spam sites
and malware-infected sites
• Look who is linking to you and who you link to
and see how reputable they are as perceived by
us (look at the page score for reference)
• If you get links from popular news sites, look for
the writers who talk about you and link to you –
now you know who to talk to the next time you
have interesting content on your site

10. Miscellaneous Tips
• Submit your site to search engines so that we can crawl
you
• Make security your priority when you start blogs, forums
and message boards
• Links are one of the indicators but not the only indicator
Good Luck