Everything has value and perspective is so important. The question regarding nofollow links above was great (and ties in nicely with the Twitter post that SugarRae wrote today here).
It is all about traffic and getting that traffic to your page. Search engines are great for that, but it seems a lot of stock should be put into a contextually relevant link that comes from a off-site page that relates to one of your own pages. I’ll take a primed visitor anyday over a keyword search (okay, some days!)

The example of the finance industry site linking out to an external forum in exchange for a sticky in a contextually relevant sub-forum is golden. Everyone benefits and no one needs to put in more effort than required; no duplicate fora or extra work — but more traffic for all.

The last thing that caught my attention was #8 on link building strategies. If individuals spent less time getting ahold of bulk or mass links that are (1) simple to obtain and (2) don’t carry much value from a visitor perspective and spent more time going after traffic generating links balanced with dofollow love everyone would benefit… not to mention passing some of that traffic and love around. The response about “the tendancy to focus too much on pagerank” is spot on as well… take some of that link building time or spend and put it into new content or content optimization.

Just wondering one thing… with branding being so important to any company… why would an individual take the quick hit of mass link building? Slow and steady seems to be the feedback provided by the panel above and the reasoning is pretty strong. Why not stick to directly related (industry) sites and then slowly drift to indirectly related sites as long as the landing page on your site supports the link and anchor?

Nice post tho…