A Few Things You Should Know about Link Building
There is a lot more to link building than simply getting as many as possible. It is well known that Google has over 200 criteria by which to rank a website, and also that links is a big part of that… A big misconception though, is that links is just one factor. There are several link based factors that can impact your search ranking.
Quantity
This one is really obvious. But all other things being equal, more links is of course better than less. Not all links are built equal though. So build as many links as you can. There is no such thing as a bad link – you can’t control who links to you, so no inbound link will ever have a negative effect on your SEO… That said, some links are near worthless, so try not to waste your time on those ones.
Quality
Again, this is a pretty well known one – the quality of the site that links to you is important. A high page rank site will give you more link juice than a low quality one. One link from a very high PR site might be worth 100 from a very low PR. That said, these sorts of links are very hard to come by.
Position
Have a look at a page on your site: there are lots of links aren’t there? some more important than others. You’ll probably agree, that the most important links are in certain places in most sites. Google knows this. They know that generally more important links happen nearer the top, or near the navigation. Links at the bottom are less likely to be seen by visitors and hence are less valuable.
Keywords
Links are important for building authority, but remember, you actually want to rank for a specific phrase don’t you? Google needs to know that your site is good quality – but it also needs to know what it is about. Build 10,000 links with the text “click here” and that’s what you’ll rank for.
Dilution
A web page isn’t like the magic porridge pot, the more link juice it donates, the less there is left for everyone else. If your link comes from a page that has a whole bunch of links on it, your link will be worth much less than if it were the only link on the page. That goes for sites on the whole too. A site that does a lot of linking out is less valuable than a site that is more selective about who it links to.
History
You can often outrank a competitor without getting anywhere near the number of links they have, why? because the currentness of a link matters too. Having a history of old backlinks will help a lot – but in competitive niches the search engines tend to favor links built more recently over links that are much older. This is so that they can promote “hot” new sites that are making a buzz. Your need your site to be “hot”.
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13 Responses to “A Few Things You Should Know about Link Building”
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I have to disagree with your statement about “There is no such thing as a bad link”, there is such a thing as Google can penalise you (lower your SERP, PR and even ban your page) for getting bad links (for example paid links, link from span sites and manipulative reciprocal links). That all depends on your site authority, if you have a high authoritative page than you probably won’t get penalised, but if you have a low authoritative site there is a bigger chance for getting penalised. Most of the time Google will just discount bad links, but not always.
One example web page that has been penalised is tagspage.com (don’t know if it is because of bad links or something else). It used to have PR7, now its only PR2.
Very informative piece of article, especially for those who are foreign to link building..
Igreo, i was wondering if tagspage.com that you mentioned, actually have their pagerank reduced due to them selling of links instead… Look at their page title “Pagerank 7 Directory – Get tagged!” & all the irrelevant links on their homepage… That would probably raise a huge red flag…
You are probably right about tagspage.com, but there are cases when web sites were penalised for example buying links, I can’t thing of a got example, but there are, just google something like “google penalised my page for buying links” and you will get some examples.
well, my personal view on this, which probably not many people will agree with..
I do think that for those sites who claimed to be penalized for buying links, there is a high possibility that the bulk of their backlink profile is made up from paid links and when Google algo managed to detect and devalue all those paid links, their backlink profile shrank accordingly.. therefore causing drop in ranking etc.. giving the wrong impression that they have been penalized..
This is probably not penalization but more of links value from paid links being removed.. But well, i might be wrong..
Hi,
In point of view ,Quality is the most important factor in link building.If you have good quality links from reputed sites means search engines give more value to your website.
Regards |Madav
I was under the impression as well that there is penalties from Google for having irrelevant and unsavory inbound links to your site, esp if they are not relevant to the content of your site or the page. So that mass link submissions can get tricky because some SEO firms submit based on category etc and you can end up with some nasty in bound links?
Can an inbound link be bad? I agree with the post. Google realises that you don’t control who links to you, so a particular link may be irrelevant, but I don’t believe it is ever “bad”. However, as we don’t have unlimited time to acquire links, we always need to decide how much effort it is worth expending to acquire an inbound link. A link from a site with no relevance to your site will provide little if any value and may not be worth the effort to ask for the link even in those cases where they have a high PR value. Typically relevance means thematic relevance, but geographic relevance may be an issue in some circumstances.
I wouldn’t entirely discount links from sites / pages that have low PR scores, particularly if they are very relevant to you customers. Who knows what rank they will have the next time Google updates their published PR ranks. Low PR value sites can sometimes be easier to ask for and receive a link. Consider it a long term investment.
As for history, I think Google is more impressed with continuous growth in the number of links. This is what happens naturally to sites with great content. Quality content attracts links. A little bit of effort on link acquisition on a regular basis may be a good strategy.
I think it is always worth remembering that a site with thousands of good links, but with poor content and structure will struggle to outperform sites with a good balance between structure, content and links.
There’s a marketing expression that comes to mind … if you can fake sincerity you’ve got it made. A link building campaign is a bit like that. We want everything to look natural. Typically hundreds of links don’t just arrive overnight particularly when they are from irrelevant sites pointing to our under prepared site. This looks false and if Google senses our fake sincerity the effort may be in vain.
Loved the 10,000 links with teh keyword ‘click here’ .. very good tip.. many would never think of that!!
Thanks, some very helpful tips.
And i also disagree with what you said “there is no such thing as a bad link”
If you get a link from a known link farm or a penalised site, then Google will penalise your site too!
Igre brezplacne online igre. Igrate lahko miselne igre, zabavne igre, športne igre, strelske igre, arkadne igre in druge brezplacne online igre.
Its very important to be first on some market.
I like your post about:
- So build as many links as you can. There is no such thing as a bad link – you can’t control who links to you, so no inbound link will ever have a negative effect on your SEO…
- Google needs to know that your site is good quality – but it also needs to know what it is about.
I prefer to get links from several parts:
- social bookmarks links
- links from press releases
- links from forums
- links from blogs
- links from web 2.0 sites like hubpages, squidoo, blogspots, etc
It is very true that some links are better than others. When you get back links from sites that have high rankings then they can improve your rankings but if you receive many links from poor ranking sites then they will not help your website much.