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Excerpt: The Google Algorithm is a giant black box. We can make inferences as to what works and what doesn’t work, but one generally held rule is that you need links to rank. A widely held belief is the more competitive the niche, the more links you need. There has been plenty of conversation recently about linking not being as important, social signals being more important than links, anchor text not being as important, and other proclamations about the decreasing influence of links. In the search results that I’ve seen for competitive financial terms, auto industry terms, and health related terms, links are definitely alive and well and there is a definite correlation between the more links and higher rankings. One aspect of link building that often gets overlooked (at least I’ve overlooked it previously) is getting links from different sources. If you notice link profiles of high ranking sites, they generally have links from a wide variety of sources. I’ve noticed that when I push real hard on a certain link type for too long, the benefits slowly grind to a halt. But when I switch up the link type, I’ll notice an additional boost. For example, recently for a client we got many guest posts targeting a competitive term. We rose from the top of page two to the bottom of page one, plateauing around position 8. After a month of being stalled we switched up the link type (still targeting the same term) from guest posting to niche directories…