For the most part the Google Caffeine update was not a substantive change, but more of an enhancement.  The search engine results are now posted faster (almost twice as fast) and with more accuracy in pinpointing exact keywords especially as the keywords relate to breaking news stories. Google appears to be A/B testing the search engine results more often to measure the click-throughs and click-backs. The key take away is that Google is learning and reacting faster to the intelligence it gathers, as a results competitors can move up and down in the search engine results faster.

There are many services out there that offer link swapping. That is, my site points a link to your site and your site points one back to me. That is great for me if you are the nytimes.com and I am johndoesblog.com, but in most scenarios where two sites exchange reciprocal links there is little value to be had by the reciprocation of the links.

Let’s take a look at link triangulation using three fictional web sites; corvetteking.com, corvettequeen.com, and corvetteprince.com These three sites sell products related to Corvettes, and can be considered complementary Corvette enthusiast sites. In traditional linking strategies, if corvetteking.com links to corvettequeen.com and that is it, there is minimal benefit benefit because the links are reciprocated.

Enter link triangulation. Corvetteking.com calls up  corvettequeen.com and corvetteprince.com and says “I’ll point a text link from my home page to corvettequeen.com, corvettequeen.com will point a text link from her home page to corvetteprince.com and corvetteprince.com will point a text link from his home page to me (corvetteking.com). In this scenario there is no reciprocal linking so more of the link juice is harnessed by all three sites. True, you may be helping a competitor, but they are helping you too and all three sites are distancing themselves from their other competitors.

Remember to use the most important keywords in the anchor tag of the link. Also, it is not a good idea to use any linking strategy to manipulate search engine results. Use the link triangle if you feel that the sites in the link triangle would add value to visitors experience of all three sites.

Are links from .Gov, Edu. and .Org any more valuable than, say, a .com or .net? The answer is that it depends. Let’s take a specific example. Say you sell coffee table books. Now let’s say you have a choice of receiving an inbound link from either a small college home page with an .edu address that has a PR (PageRank) of 6, or an inbound link from Coffee Table Books International, an emerging expert in the field of coffee table books with a PR of 4.

While we all would like to have both, if I could choose only one I would choose the link from Coffee Table Books International. The conventional wisdom dictates that you should go after the big PR link and get all the power that link will bestow on your site. Why then go after the Coffee Table Books International link? The reason is two-fold. First, while the Google Juice from the college is no doubt a huge positive, it is not complementary to your line of business unless it is a page about coffee table books. Second, visitors to Coffee Table Books International are far more likely to become customers, advocates, or fans of your site than are visitors to the college.

See the below video from Seomoz.com that does a wonderful job of explaining the importance of links.