(the following is a guest post from Melanie Nathan)

Ask a SEO what their least favorite task is and they’ll most likely tell you it’s link building. That’s because link building can be tedious, time consuming and mind numbingly hard.

What does that say about the following people, who have consciously chosen to make link building a main weapon in their SEO arsenal? That they eat SEO lightning and crap link building thunder!

<...... cue Rocky theme ............>

These aren’t just people who know “a little about link building”. Oh no. These people are so well versed and experienced, that they can very safely be considered experts on the subject (though most of them will hate being called experts).

They all have a special aptitude for one of the hardest aspects of SEO, and since effective link builders are an especially rare, yet often overlooked breed, they’re being recognized here today.

In our last poll we asked everyone; Do you use reciprocal links in your SEO programs - the result was a resounding NO to that one. Here's the breakdown on it;

• 74% - No I don't see value in them any more
• 9.1% - Yes I actively seek out link partners
• 6.5% - Yes but covertly instead of 'link' pages
• 6.5% - No I am worried about getting smacked
• 3.9% - Yes but I use 3-4 way link programs

That's a pretty definitive answer on that one... it seems that most of the readership of the Trail have no use for them these days. I suppose it is worth noting that 15% still do them... but few play with 3-4 way trickery. I suppose if I covertly arranged link drops with a page that was FAR more authoritative than mine, and passed greater juice, I might consider it, but generally speaking I feel there are better ways to go about link programs these days...

What say you?

This week we're talking analytics and the question is; Do you trust analytics programs? - so why not head over, check the early results and cast your vote?

Last week over in the Dojo we ran a poll (open to the public) that asked the question; Are directory links worth doing?

We put the word out on Twitter and elsewhere and so far have more than 84 responses. Now, it wasn't the most scientific poll, since I was cheeky about one of the options, but I believe most went past that and we have some reasonably good data as to what the community thinks of doing directory submissions as part of their link building programs.

At the end of the day the majority (nearly 55%) felt that they were worth doing, but only the top/niche ones out there. Also of interest is that 'Not sure, losing value' and 'WTF is this 2005?' combined for 32% and may speak to them being in decline as a link building tactic. Here's the breakdown;

• 54.8% Yes, but only a selection of top/niche ones
• 21.4% Not sure, they're losing value
• 10.7% WTF? Is this 2005? NO!
• 8.3% Yes I mass spam them
• 4.8% Only top paid ones are worth it

You can see all the data here

This week, in large part due to my coverage of a reciprocal link spam detection patent, the question is; Do you use reciprocal links as part of your SEO programs?

Early data say... no... why not drop into the Dojo and cast your vote?

Do you know where to find prime link real estate?

Brother Bill expertly covered (yet another) patent on page segmentation the other day; this time from Yahoo. It is certainly an area that SEOs really might want to be paying more attention to these days. Considering that each of the big three have dabbled into it (to varying degrees) over the last ½ decade, there is every reason to believe that something might be here (all that ‘where there is smoke’… yada yada).

Page segmentation has widely been developed for use in OCR applications to better understand text/image relationships. More recently, we’ve seen this area of expertise brought to the online world. One important aspect that should be of particular interest to those in the SEO world is in the link related ramifications.

Let us consider that Google, the king of link reliant search engines, would certainly find a huge benefit from this approach for valuating links (or even indexation decisions).

An interesting example is the recent update to the Google Blog search that fixed the issue of Google indexing blog roll links (problematic when using the link: command). As soon as that news broke I thought, ‘How’d they do that I wonder?’ – Obviously page segmentation came to mind.