Gosh, this is a somewhat crazy question, I have a few ideas, but it may help if you give us an idea of what you mean by link building? What techniques will you be using / teaching?

I am not really sure about a game, but you could easily make a lesson out of identifying link candidates for a given piece of content - something like.

• Site A has this piece of content which they want to rank for Keywords X, Y & Z.
• Currently the content has no external links but several similar pieces of content (and provide links) currently have many links

The 'game' would be to identify the links pointing to the similar content, find the social accounts of users who have posted those links using various tools and then to do some social outreach to build relationships with those users with the goal of eventually asking for a link.

Not 100% sure how you would build this into a game - it would really need some artificial content and link prospects to really work.

Hope that helps! 
Marcus

This is something else where you can consider quality and the internal linking of the forum itself with regards to the quality of a followed signature link.

So, the forum has tens of thousands of posts and pages. If you have say 20 posts of no real substance on backwater posts to get your post count up and get your followed link and leave it at that... well, the link is going to be of little value.

If you have hundreds of posts, from some quite weight discussions that in turn get linked to from external sources, then, your profile is much better linked to from these weighty pages and in turn, is of much more value as an outbound link.

This is a very simple look at how quality can be discerned quite easily for individual links on any given forum and how you simply can't get away from providing a quality contribution (or at the very least, hawking in on quality discussions but I would venture they have a solution for that also).

Hey, I agree, if you are trying to just drop bombs, then this is potentially dangerous, if you are trying to add value then this is a solid approach.

The point I wanted to clarify is that there are no good or bad techniques. Directories are not bad, neither are they good. Same goes for everything else. We can't just demonise technique A and sign off on technique B.

OP - move away from that kind of simplistic thinking and approach everything from a quality and relevance perspective and you will be okay.

If you are trying to just drop links without contributing in a meaningful way then... well, do some more reading, this is not going to help you in any way, shape or form.

Link safe folks!

Hey Matt, not sure I agree with the logic there.

The only important metrics here are quality and relevance. If you contribute in a quality discussion and bring value, then you could do this all day long. Likewise, if you build a best of class resource or provide the best answer, you are going to see people linking to it from forums, blog comments etc.

Quality, is a great way to put the breaks on and there is only so many quality forum interactions you can manage in one day. Likewise, there are only so many quality discussions in any one given day.

The risk factors here is if you get silly with anchor text etc. Just link natural, the URL is likely best, forget anchor text, just provide the reference. They are nofollowed so effectively not part of the link graph anyhow so in my experience, you can fill your boots here, but just mind the quality and relevance.

Have you a single example where contributing to high quality forum discussions would provide a negligible impact on traffic? Are we not swaying into negative SEO paranoia here?

Re: Everything is okay in moderation, but as a link building strategy?

This is not a link building strategy, this is an exposure, branding and referral traffic exercise. Sure, there are links that may in turn drive traffic, but it will not impact your rank in any meaningful way (unless someone sees the discussion, reads your resource and in turn links to it so... another reason to focus on relevant, high quality, high traffic sources where you are further telling the world about your great resource you linked to).

Nobody should be scared of contributing to a discussion in a meaningful way and dropping a link if it adds further value. If you try to add some SEO to this, start trying to use targeted anchor text, start creating discussions and linking out from them or start dropping the links in irrelevant places well, I would still venture that will do no harm, but it is going to be a big fat waste of your time but still, then you are trying to manipulate things and you deserve anything you have coming.

Hey, there can be great value from forum links, not so much for raising your ranking but for referral traffic and visibility but you have to bring some considerable value to the discussion.

For instance, say you were a widget consultant and you then monitored several forums where people generally talked about widgets and asked questions. You could then swing by and chip into the discussion and help people.

You can improve upon this by answering peoples questions but then providing a link to a more in-depth answer or relevant resource on your site. Then, you benefit from folks finding these answers, seeing you know your stuff and clicking through to your site (where you can try to convert them to social accounts, newsletters, download some kind of guide etc).

We really have to look at things beyond SEO and beyond ranking with a more inbound marketing perspective and with that in mind, dropping nofollow links on forums, Q&A, blog comments etc can be a valuable approach to drive traffic to your site.

But, bear in mind, forums are funny places, often with established pecking orders, so you just can't barge in and start dropping links, they have to be highly relevant and expand upon the discussion and you have to bring value to the post where you drop the link else you just risk being marked a spammer.

Just my tuppence (5 cents).

Cheers

Marcus

Hey Graeme

I am unsure of any specific guidelines with regards to HTML special characters but I would tend to keep my page titles to the agreed and safe characters. In this instance, the page title is totally fine but ascii has been abused in page titles in years gone by to create more catchy looking SERP listings.

(¯'·.¸(¯'·.¸Free X !!! Click Here !!!¸.·'´¯)¸.·'´¯)

You may find a variety of things happen and your titles get rewritten.

One other point or perspective - you mention that Googlebot sees the ascii code but a human sees the bullet character. Well, where? How does your SERP listing look? If the page title in the search engine results looks like this:

My Product • Category | Site Name

Then, I would say that is a pretty good reason to do away with the special characters.

If this was me, I would keep it simple, stick with the best practices and make do with standard characters to break up your title tags: - | etc.

Some links that may help:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624

Hope that helps!
Marcus