Link Building in 2012 (and a really cool app)

Thinking about my my topic for my SEP post all I could keep coming up with was talking about GoWalla being taken down and this alternative to GoWalla Loso that I have become completely obsessed with. However I do realize that this is about Search Engines, Affiliate and strategy so I decided to go with one of the editor's ideas which is a few changes to my link building strategies in 2012. So anyways, my strategies are changing a little bit for the new year and here are three changes I am making, depending on the client and site.

1. Building brand links instead of anchor text. With the heavy emphasis on giving trust and brands higher positioning (theory but sort of a reality), I am letting the sites post off of the brand name or whatever terms they choose. If the content around the posts, articles, pages, etc... is relevant, the SEs are smart enough to know what to rank you for.

2. In August Google said that subdomains will count as internal links instead of unique urls. For this I am not going to change much, but for sites that were relying on passing on rank from subdomains, etc... I am changing the strategy by bringing some of their subdomains to the main urls where it is appropriate. This is for clients and my own personal sites that have subdomains. I have always preferred to keep copy on the main url instead of splitting it, unless you have numerous different topics and categories and you don't want to damage the main url.

3. With the recent drop of deals sites from Bing over the holidays, I am going to be making sure that every and any site, not matter how relevant or optimal the link is, has good content, is well done and not "thin". You should do this anyways, but sometimes you come across ideal sites that seem thin but are still a great backlink so you take them. Now it's time to measure the value of these amazingly relevant sites, knowing they could be dropped or penalized and not knowing how that can have an effect on your sites since they link to them.

Link building in 2012 should be about the same as link building in 2011, but with the ever changing algorithms, you never know what else we will all be adjusting.