Google is on an updating spree and has effected several changes in its Panda search algorithm along with changes in Knowledge Graph and SafeSearch, among its other tools. These changes will affect you in different ways depending on your field of work in terms of content as well as link creation and optimization.
Your link strategy will certainly need to adapt to changes made by Google. However, you need to firstly comprehend those changes before devising or altering your link strategy for improved link optimization.
The changes done by Google to its indexing robots will affect internal and external links. The first step towards optimizing your links is to check how the revised algorithm affects links on your own website. These include your own links and paid links as well as links that are swapped or incentivized.
You need to check and re-check page rankings after each Google update and test links on each page as well as links that point to your site. If you notice that certain web-pages are missing in the results then you might need to change anchors or your onsite linking structure to get them back on the results page.
Google’s latest update indicates that their search engine will display only the most relevant results against the query while ignoring those that are less relevant. While this might not affect links on your webpage that lead to other sites to a great extent, it might affect inbound links in an adverse manner if your links are without anchor text or are present in sites with lower credibility.
Thus, if you do have external links on a site with high credibility then adding a few more links might help please the updated Google bots. In addition to examining your own link strategy, it is a good idea to check top ranked websites and then examine their linking strategy to find out why they are preferred by Google.
Since the revised Google algorithm provides higher preference to content that has been updated recently, even if it is from the same site, a good idea would be to try inserting new links on your pages at regular intervals. You can also try separating content on pages that were previously too similar since this strategy will boost chances of that page ranking higher on different queries.
As Google has modified its algorithm when ranking PDF or other non HTML documents into HTML, you too need to examine if automated name changes are affecting your ranking in an adverse manner. You may need to examine title signals or include them in case they are absent. This move will enable you to format your PDF files as well as meta-data in a better manner. Again, regular testing will help you understand if you have pleased Google with the changes.
You need to update your own link strategy to keep up with Google updates. You should use the above information to your advantage if you want to extract the most out of your link strategy.