Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz's presentation at Searchfest Portland, 2011, on the future of link signals in Google + Bing.

1. The Future of Great LinksWhere link analysis is heading and how marketers can win today and tomorrow.

2. “Essentially, we've been doing the same kind of search now for over a decade, right? It's basically anchor text and PageRankand inbound links, and that's how we've kind of decided what page is best for a particular term… But there are signals beyond this.” Stefan Weitz, Director for Bing Search http://www.seomoz.org/blog/director-of-bing-discusses-holistic-search-and-clickstream-data-whiteboard-friday

3. “One piece of advice I give to SEO masters is, don’t chase after Google’s algorithm, chase after your best interpretation of what users want, because that’s what Google’s chasing after,” Matt Cutts, Head of Web Spam, Google http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/business/media/11search.html

4. Link Building Signals Today

5. Diversity of Domains + Linking C-Blocks # of Linking Root Domains to URL # of Links to URL http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements

6. Anchor Text # of Links w/ exact match anchor text # of linking root domains w/ exact match anchor text http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/business/media/11search.html

7. Features of Linking Pages http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html Data via http://www.opensiteexplorer.org

8. Features of Linking Domains http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html Data via http://www.opensiteexplorer.org

9. Topic Modeling / Topical Relationship? http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lda-and-googles-rankings-well-correlated

10. TL;DR – Quantity & Quality of Links http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/big-budget-link-building-advanced-analysis-5566731

11. Link Building Signals of the Future

12. Social Signals Page A 646 links from 36 root domains 2 tweets Page B 1 link from 1 root domain 522 tweets http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-do-tweets-influence-search-rankings-an-experiment-for-a-cause

13. Social Signals Page B – the tweeted version – ranks #1! Page A 646 links from 36 root domains 2 tweets Page B 1 link from 1 root domain 522 tweets http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-do-tweets-influence-search-rankings-an-experiment-for-a-cause

14. Social Signals http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings-unexpected-case-study

15. Social Signals http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings-unexpected-case-study#jtc133590

16. Author Authority Danny Sullivan: Do you try to calculate the authority of someone who tweets that might be assigned to their Twitter page. Do you try to “know,” if you will, who they are? Bing: Yes. We do calculate the authority of someone who tweets. For known public figures or publishers, we do associate them with who they are. (For example, query for Danny Sullivan) Google: Yes we do compute and use author quality. We don’t know who anyone is in real life :-) http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389

18. Have authentic, followed social accounts

19. Display obvious, robust contact information

20. Register with government/civic organizations

21. Receive traffic from diverse sources

22. Generate branded search query volume

23. Run offline marketing/advertising campaigns

24. Often exist only online

25. Rarely have significant social accounts

26. Frequently use email forms only

27. Stay “under the radar”

28. Search is often 90%+ of traffic

29. Have little-no branded search demand

30. Ignore the offline worldhttp:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-next-generation-of-ranking-signals

31. Domain Name / Brand Name “Mentions” http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/labs/blogscape

32. Depreciation/Filtering of Anchor Text http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-recommendation-for-googles-webspam-team

33. Some Future-Looking Link Building Tactics I Love

34. Q+A Sites http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/question_and_answer_sites.php

35. Building Your Own Social Community http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://mashable.com/2010/11/15/biggest-facebook-brands/

36. Media Coverage http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.madetostick.com/excerpts/

37. Comment Marketing http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/recommendations-blog-commenting-marketing-strategy

38. Competitive Analysis of Top “Brands” Where do these brands earn their links? http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.opensiteexplorer.org

39. Investigating Brand “Mention” Sources Facebook page Blippr? Crunchbase profile App profile on Blackberry Twitter account BusinessWeek Profile Chrome Extension Mashable Article

41. Blog: www.seomoz.org/blog

42. Email: rand@seomoz.orgYou can now try SEOmoz PRO Free! http://www.seomoz.org/freetrial