Google 1
Yahoo 22
Bing 64
All the Web 21
Alta Vista 21

After checking with several backlink checkers, I think the actual number should be about 22.

There are two possible explanations that I can think of. First, my host had lots of problems on Monday. From what I can tell my site was down for several hours. Perhaps Google crawled it then. Second, on a different site I own I got spammed big time this week with hundreds of long posts with text links all over the place. Maybe Google crawled that one. Google would know that I own both because I have them in the same Google Analytics account. But I don’t know if one site would affect the other.

@Alok – This is true that link exchanges and link farms have been pretty much devalued by the search engines and not only don’t value or hgelp with rankings, but are detrimental in some cases.

@Calvin – I will certainly address this. My question for you is “did the PageRank alone drop or have you seen a subsequent drop in traffic from Google? Generally, PageRank is an evidence on the inbound links to your site. If the quality of the sites linking to you have been devalued, then that would cause your PageRank to drop as well. I hope that helps, and look forward to this post next week.

I like the way you gave your suggestions point by point. They are very clear, and I have done some of these things successfully.

This week I checked my page rank, and it has suddenly gone to zero. I am not sure why. If possible in your next blog can you address what to do when your page rank falls?

One is to authority sites, within the context of my post. Done right, this can encourage others to link to my post, because it makes it obvious that I’ve done my homework plus provided a resource.

The other is links to individual blog posts on good blogs in my blog’s niche. Bloggers who moderate comments will look at the source of your trackback before deciding to publish it or put it in the spam bin. Being linked to in a good post is a compliment, and may get the attention of a new follower who may subscribe and return the favor. Done graciously & combined with Anthony’s strategy #2 (Commenting on other blogs) this is a great way to introduce yourself to heroes and prospective peers with whom you’d like to build name recognition and awareness of your link-worthy content.

If a blogger is comfortable throwing a little bread on the waters, some linking out can become a good inlink builder.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by oldschoolseo: What you need to know about Link Building – http://su.pr/2UWNmZ...