I'm Steve Morris, the CEO and founder of NEWMEDIA.COM. Here's my input for your piece about the challenges of link building and how to get past them.
We faced one of our toughest challenges trying to build links for a client in the overcrowded SaaS market. Our PR outreach was effective, and the campaign ended up securing the kinds of links agencies usually dream about, with placements in The New York Times, Oprah Magazine, Cosmopolitan, and other well-known, credible publications. On paper, these should have been a huge boost. But our rankings barely moved.
For a moment, it felt like the standard best practices had just quit working altogether. In hindsight, the root issue was pretty simple. It was how these big sites handle pagination and archive their articles. Most of the links ended up deep within multi-page lists and quickly got lost in barely accessible archives. While those placements looked impressive in our reports, Googlebot wasn't likely to pass much ranking value from spots almost no one, whether human or crawler, ever visits.
Once we realized that landing "brand name" links wasn't enough to drive results in this field, we went beyond just switching tactics and instead took a closer look. We put together a full forensic breakdown of how our client's top five search competitors were getting links. Using Majestic, Open Site Explorer, and trusty Excel, I compared over 80 different factors involving links, context, and anchor usage. The differences were clear. Our client had a suspiciously high 29% of all anchors exactly matching their target keywords, while the top performers barely went above 2.5%. We also noticed repeating trends, with things like .edu discount links and listings in specialized directories actually driving not just rankings, but real traffic and conversions.