If you’re a link building provider then I’d love to hear from you but here are a few tips..
Don’t explain the benefits of link building to me.
Don’t explain SEO to me.
Don’t send me SEO reports.
Don’t send me ranking reports.
Don’t tell me what keywords to target. – You’re only part of a much bigger picture.
Don’t sell – i couldn’t care who your other clients are, or what rankings you got for someone else.
Don’t insist on phone calls – if you can’t explain your service in 2 paragraphs via email i’m not interested.
Don’t ask for a contract longer than 1 month. If we like the work we will renew month after month. Some suppliers have worked with us for 4+ years
Don’t bullshit – claiming to have a database of 1000’s of contacts when all you do is outsource to a 3rd party will piss me off(wont it Gary).
Don’t over promise. If you struggle to meet requirements say so, it’s ok, but tell me as soon as you can – don’t wait until the report is due to tell me your 2nd cousins dog has been sick or our blog sucks so the viral failed.
Don’t make me chase the report you promised.
Don’t try and find out my budget before giving me an idea of a price.

This really should be easy for both of us.

What to do
Within a couple of emails we agree what work to do.
Send me an invoice
You then get on with it, i leave you alone.
End of agreed time you send me a report.

If this hasn’t put you off then get in touch.

Briefly list the work you do – bullet point list would be perfect.
Show me recent samples of your work.
Give me a price, and then give a 2nd price for sending lots of work.
Let me know how much work you can do.

(contacting me should me easy – if not then online isn’t for you)

0toCash
Andrew Girdwood
Bill Slawski
Blogstorm
Church of the customer
David Naylor
EarlGay
Eric Enge
Esrun
Hobo SEO
Irish Wonder
John Andrews
John Battelle
Kissmetrics
Level 343
Link Spiel
Lyndon Antcliff
Ryan Clark
Sebastian’s Pamphlets
Seth Godin
SEO Gadget
State of Search
Tim Grice
The Google Cache
Vinicius Vacanti
Wiep Knol

For the last couple of years i’ve been a big user of the Yahoo API. Lots of accounts and proxies meant our domain tool was performing 50,000+ backlink checks a day. Amusingly, you could generate your own API keys without the need to register, just add lots of proxies - http://www.packetflip.com/

Finding a good alternative to the yahoo API proved tricky. Yahoo allowed us to grab the first 50 backlinks of a domain with a single call. The bonus was these 50 tended to be the best links so were enough to quickly evaluate a domain. This proved perfect for what we wanted.

So i turned to the SEOMoz API, quick and simple to get running and so far hasn’t complained about out aggressive use. For me the problem with SEOMoz was the metrics “Domain Authority”  and “Page Authority” . These are far too often flagging domains as good when a quick glance at the links shows they are some spammers cast offs. (still a bloody brilliant API and for FREE)

Next i turned to the Majestic SEO API, for this we needed a Platinum account – at £250 its a bit pricey, but for that you also get much larger reporting quotas. Problem here was similar to SEOMoz, Majestics AC Rank often scored some nasty domains far to high.

The good news is if you combine both “Domain Authority” , “Page Authority” and “AC Rank” you suddenly get most of the low quality domains removed. We could do further analysis on the links of each domains but these 3 simple metrics are proving good enough for what want.

All you need now is a big list of domains to check, but that’s another post.

Deleted the old blog as i had this constant nagging to post something, but can resist no longer, i need to post and make the web a better place and add more drivel.