Dutch Cowboys (2011): the latest trends in link building and social media

My first article on Dutch Cowboys appeared on 13 May 2011, under the title The latest trends in link building and social media. Linkbuilding-Specialist had existed for about a year at that point and was described in the article as a link building agency from Hoofddorp.

What the article is about

The agency interviewed three Dutch link building agencies and four international link builders. Those four were Rand Fishkin, then the face of SEOmoz, and three speakers from the link building seminar held in London at the end of March 2011. According to the article, Fishkin was the initiator of that international event, together with Distilled.

The aim was to set out the dos and don'ts of link building and social media for 2011, with the latest news from London included. In total, seven link building professionals had their say. In 2011 social media were new territory for SEO, and the piece was precisely about how the two come together.

Rand Fishkin and the video on YouTube

Rand Fishkin later founded SparkToro and is still one of the best known voices in search engine marketing. The Linkbuilding-Specialist YouTube channel has the video Link building tips by Rand Fishkin. The channel describes the agency as a specialist in link building, SEO, online video marketing and YouTube marketing. The channel is still online and is one of the sources that show my work from that time.

What I take from it today

What applied in 2011 still applies: one relevant mention in the right place is worth more than a hundred random links. That lesson is part of my work on local link building for businesses and of the way I now build sources for AI search engines. You can read the 2012 follow-up on the page about the link building trends 2012 with eight experts. All the articles are listed on my Dutch Cowboys overview.

Original and archive

The article is no longer live on dutchcowboys.nl; the old link returns an error. You can read it via the Internet Archive. The screenshot above comes from that archive. A short summary is available on gijs-bodenstaff.nl.