It has been pretty quiet in the blogosphere during the festive season, but there have been some great posts about link building lately, that I thought worthy of sharing.

Since the Panda and Penguin updates, webmasters are having to rethink the way link profiles are used to determine Google’s search results. Google is determined to weed out sites with spammy non-relevant links and make search results more intuitive and personal.

What does all this mean for link builders? Well, I gathered the following articles from the last few weeks to help answer that question – Happy Reading!

Semantic Search and Link Building Without Links -The Future for SEO? by Simon Penson

In this article Simon talks about how anchor text is no longer the primary factor when it comes to determining the relevancy of links. Other things like social signals, link age and personalized search query history are now equally – if not more important.

Simon says Semantic Association is the new catch phrase and determining the context of search queries is the new holy grail for search engineers. Google no longer wants to find out exactly what we are searching for, they also want to know why, so they can deliver search results personalized to our unique needs.

Simon lists several innovative tools he has used to adapt to these Semantic Search changes and encourages webmasters to even ‘post without links’ in order to take advantage of co-occurrence, “(co-occurrence) is a way of ranking websites and pages not on inbound links but by how many times they are MENTIONED in close proximity to key phrases.”

Interesting stuff!

3 Areas That Get Overlooked When Building Links in a Bubble by Julie Joyce

I engaged with this post straight away because I could relate to Julie’s suggestion that most link builders are operating in a vacuum. Having worked on many link building campaigns for clients, I know this is often true.

SEM is such a complex and ongoing process that one company may have the contract for link building, while another has the PPC contract and so on. The problem is how to align the various strategies.

Julie’s article describes ways to align link building strategies with PPC; Social Media Campaigns; and Technical SEO – for an efficient and effective overall marketing campaign that is sure to reach your target audience.

Your Best Link Building Tool in 2013: Community Manager by Kate Morris

This post follows on perfectly from the one above. Kate describes link building as a process of relationship building and outlines how to integrate in-house link building strategies across an organization.

More than ever before link building is about developing key relationships. Most companies already have staff which perform this function in various ways including: executives, marketing and customer service representatives. Kate says that what may be missing is a Community Manager who can oversee internal and external company relationships.

Kate lists the top personal traits for link builders/community managers in this interesting ‘human resources’ slanted article.

Don’t Build Links, Build Bubbles By Craig Bradford

While many organizations are underwhelmed by the marketing power of Google Plus, this post could change all that.

Craig describes how engaging with Google Plus can radically change the results of your customer’s search queries – in a way that Facebook and other platforms can’t match.

If we are signed into our Google Plus account when web browsing – our online connections influence the search results we receive. Craig describes this ‘filter bubble’ capacity of Google Plus – as more important than building traditional links and will revolutionize the way companies build and maintain relationships with their customers.

A must read for all marketing professionals!

A new tool to disavow links – Google Webmaster Central Blog

Although this post appeared back in November 2012, I felt I couldn’t do a ‘top five’ post on link building, without including it.

The new Google Disavow Links Tool is Google’s answer to taking control of your backlink profile post-Penguin, by removing all spammy in-bound links from your site – without needing to gain the permission of the site which is linking to you.

That’s all for this week, happy post-Penguin link building everyone!