The conventional wisdom is that first Google says so. And, second, if links from other “bad” sites did hurt your site, then this opens up a whole Pandora’s box of competitors sabotaging each other’s websites. Surely, the search engines must protect a website against competitor sabotage?

But, a few months back I happened upon an article at SEOMoz that talked about how some of the most well known names in search engine optimization and marketing view ranking factors from the search engines. On most of the items there was community agreement on issues that were old hat to me.

But, way down at the bottom, the second from the last entry was a section called “Inbound Links from Spam Sites.” Unlike on the message boards, most of the industry professionals who weighed in on this issue agree that inbound links from bad neighborhoods can hurt a website.

Of course, many used qualifiers for their statements, but nonetheless, there it is. Now, this is something I have suspected for a while myself. I suspect the search engines have engaged in a little disinformation in this area in order not the panic the SEO community and set off rogue companies right and left who are bent on sabotaging their competition.

Why would the search engines want to publicly acknowledge that sabotage of competitors was possible? But, what is even more interesting to me is that there is no conventional wisdom regarding this issue in the SEO community. Depending upon which message board, forum, blog, or website you travel to the conventional wisdom can change. And, that itself is enough to give one pause.

But, if you believe in the theory of link building as if the search engines didn’t exist, then you’ll also believe that reciprocal links and directories still have some value. If the search engines did not exist, then webmasters would use the following resources for link building:

• Directories with small targeted categories
• Reciprocal links with relevant sites
• Creating quality content
• Link baiting
• Article writing and distribution
• Press releases
• Blog comments
• Social networking
• Message boards

Of course, not all links hold equal value and links from directories and reciprocal partners may not hold the wallop that they used to, but to say they are of no value, across the board, is missing the point.

There are some directories like Yahoo, Dmoz and some niche directories that still offer targeted traffic to websites. Also, reciprocal links from similar or complimentary websites also can offer targeted traffic. So, it only follows that these resources still hold some value in the search engine algorithms.

The best linking strategy, however, is to cover all the bases. If a person links using all of the resources listed above, then a website will generally do well in the search engine rankings. Of course there are exceptions, but why limit yourself to just one linking strategy when casting a wide net can be beneficial to both direct traffic and the search engine rankings?