This article is in response to the highly controversial article Top 3 Link Building Myths Regarding Google.

I’ve received phone calls and emails regarding this subject, so I thought I’d follow up with some proof.

Once of the main sites I promote is a website called Out Gay Life.  It’s the perfect example to demonstrate some of the claims I make.

The first point I made was regarding Google counting links from non themed pages.  As you can probably tell from the title of the site (Out Gay Life) the site is a portal for the gay community.  With conventional wisdom, you’d expect that gay themed sites linking to the site would count, while non “gay” sites linking would not count.

A quick couple of screen shots from my Google Webmaster Tools account should prove the point:

This shows several sites linking to the Out Gay Life site. If you were to visit them, you’d find that virtually none of those sites contain a single word about the gay community.  I did an experiement in using “Anchor Text” as a linking method and it worked pretty well. With just a few minutes work, I managed to achieve a third place listing on Google for the term “Sarah Palin Blog”.  With all the media surrounding Sarah at the time, it’s pretty good.

What’s important to Google are the words used to link to a given site. I could post other examples of this as well (in fact, just look at some of the other terms there).  I’m also post the terms I’m listed highly on this week below.

Now, on to the last point. (I’m skipping the second point because a quick google search on the sites mentioned above that are linking to the Out Gay Life site will reveal their individual page rank.  Google counting links from duplicate content pages.  For this, I’ll refer to this very site (the MoonViper Web Services site).

I was hired by a company to build 50 “different” sites.  They had different contact forms, but for the most part every bit of content on each of the sites was the same. (note: this company has since taken over the management of these sites, and we no longer administrate them)

Try a Google search for “Green Carpet Cleaning Policy” and you’ll see 4960 results.  The vast majority of them (about 99%) are these site we built for this company.  A quick search of their statistics will show that all of their sites are getting traffic from Google.

I’ll even link to the statistics of the Out Gay Life site to demonstrate this same point.  This site is actually 21 different sites, all working off the same MoonViper CMS database.  The only real difference between the sites is the front page, which features different content  based on the URL being typed into the address box.

Of course, in these few words, I can’t explain everything (and I have to leave a few trade secrets secret.  Long story short, the methods we use work.  I’ll post one last screenshot below to show a Google search that shows we can even get Google listings in less than 10 minutes!