Many bloggers are politically outspoken and view George Bush in a less than favorable light. Hundreds of people have linked to his biography page using the phrase “miserable failure” as the link text. This Google Search should show how powerful the internet is, and how powerful link text is.

Part of why it is so expensive to build a current search engine is that all of this feedback and linking takes time to measure and collect. The whole time you are collecting it, everything is changing. The text used in links is going to be very important in the foreseeable future.

Why are Links so Powerful?

When we write stuff about ourselves we have a tendency to lie. It is human nature to boost your own site. This is why meta tags and page copy are nowhere near as powerful as the once were.

Links from other webmasters are viewed by search engines as unbiased third party votes. While Yahoo! tends to put more weight on page copy than most other major search engines do. who links to you and with what words are the #1 ranking criteria for competitive phrases in all major search engines.

Many people look for links just thinking “link,” but ofter this is not the most effective way to do link building. If you think of the web as a huge social network and think of links as relationships you have a huge advantage over your competition.

You can do many manipulative things to make your ideas appear better than they are, but if you can find more natural ways to embed yourself in the social structure of the web you will likely become extremely successful.

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