Bing has  released  some useful link building tips on their blog.  The information provided gives some detailed information on how the search engines handle attempts to manipulate search results.  I would be fairly certain that Google follows pretty similar logic.

Content

Bing starts by repeating the same that Google has said for years.

“The webmasters who create end user value within their websites, based on the needs of people, are the ones who will see their page rank improve. So where does that value come from? Content. Good, original, text-based content”

Relevancy

 The importance links from relevant sites is explained.

Authority sites

 Bing explains that links from the most highly regarded, relevant sites are best.

Unnatural Links

Bing then explains that patterns of unnatural links activity can trigger a manual review of a website. They look at:

“the relationships between linked sites, the changes to links over time, which sites link to one another, and so much more”.

“When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction. If the spam rating is high, a site can be penalized with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index.”

They then provide some examples of activity that can get you in trouble.  Most of them were old news but two of them are important.

• The number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time
• Many inbound links coming from irrelevant blog comments and/or from unrelated sites

Suggestions for Getting Legitimate Links. 

The blog post then provides some hints on how to get what they call “good, legitimate inbound links”. Here is what Bing suggests:

• Develop your site as a business brand and be consistent about that branding in your content
• Identify relevant industry experts, product reviewers, bloggers, and media people and let them know about your site and its content
• Write and publish concise, informative press releases online as developments warrant
• Publish expert articles to online article directories
• Participate in relevant blogs and forums and refer back to your site’s content when applicable (Note that some blogs and forums add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to links created in user-generated content (UGC). While creating links to your content in these locations won’t automatically create backlinks for search engines, readers who click through and like what they find may create outbound links to your site, and those are good.)
• Use social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to connect to industry influencers to establish contacts, some of whom may connect back to you (be sure you have your profiles set up with links back to your website first)
• Create an online newsletter on your site with e-mail subscription notifications
• Launch a blog or interactive user forum on your site*
• Join and participate in relevant industry associations and especially in their online forums
• Ultimately, strive to become a trusted expert voice for your industry and let people know that your website contains your published wit and wisdom

Even I was surprised that they recommend submitting to article directories. I was starting to believe that article directories where less relevant. Matt Cutts - could you please confirm this statement.  I’ll have to spend more time on our list of 750 article directories.

I believe that Google has led the way with this type of detection.  They would also use these types of methods to identify paid links. They See the complete article of Bing link building tips.

 I have just spent a couple of days researching niche education directories.  There are over a hundred listings.  Most of them are PR4 - PR8.  Please visit our education directory list.

This list is not the same as most of our lists.  Many of these sites would  considered authorities in their field.  It may be quite difficult to get listed on some of them.  Many do not accept or seek listings .   If you have a high quality educational resource site  then it would be worth the extra effort to try to get listed on these sites. You may have to email them with a friendly suggestion.  Good luck.

If you wake up looking like this, don’t go to work!!!

If your site is not appearing in Google’s search results, or it is not performing as well as t once did you can ask Google to reconsider your site.  Here are instructions and a  video produced by Google.  The video contains tips on getting your site reconsidered.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35843

Yes it took a while but PR has finally been updated on our directory list. I apologize for the delay.  For years, I ran a program that ran through the database and updated the PR.  As a result of some Google changes this program recently stopped working.  To make matters worse, the writer of the program was no longer supporting it.

I searched around for a while but did not find anything to update the PageRank.  Finally, I was able to test a program from David at PHPLD that ran on my own machine. This program worked, but it’s results were far from perfect.  The good news that it updated the high PR well.  The bad news is that I received almost a thousand inaccurate PRs of NA (-1).  I then spent 4 days going through all the NA PRs to verify them.  On the brighter side, it gave me a chance to look at many of the directories that don’t get reviewed very often. I removed many dead directories or sites that are no longer directories. Unfortunately, I did not look at all of them.  I skipped many directories that had less change of having PR, such as sites where the directory is a sub-folder (e.g. abc.com/directory).

In the coming weeks, I will be working through improving the data further. If you see a site with inaccurate PR please help me out by filling in a report. Thanks in advance.

Here are some good SEO cartoons.

http://www.clickfire.com/darth-vader-seo/

http://www.clickfire.com/viewpoints/cartoons/

Google updated their toolbar PageRank last week.   So far I have not noticed any substantial changes for directories (either good or bad).  As usual, some went up and some went down.

I have not updated the PR of the our complete list of directories.  Because of Google changes, the tool the site uses to automatically update PR is no longer functional.  We have been searching for alternatives for the last couple of months. For now, I have manually updated PR from the top listings in the most popular categories.