| SEO - How to know if - to Link or not o Link |
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| Written by TrevorWeir | |
| Friday, 21 August 2009 | |
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The idea that links from other sites to your own, actually aid your site, is a logical one. But can back-links hurt or harm your ranking?
The idea that links from other sites to your own, actually aid your site, is a logical one. But can back-links hurt or harm your ranking? Most of us search engine optimization experts keenly know what this terminology means, but for the non technical it simply means getting others to link to your site from their own. Post Altavista if you can remember that far back, this was done by exchanging links between sites, and whole communities even encouraged this but Google and others soon began to devalue these reciprocal efforts because Tom would call Harry, Bella, Davis and Susan to ask them to link to his site and Google particularly thought that this activity was simply contrived and not natural. Spam is known to many of us as that tasty meat from which the current swine flu propagates,lol, sorry couldn't help myself, but in internet lingo its also known as the email that floods your inbox and makes it difficult to find your real mail. I.e. some marketers send out unsolicited commercial spam email to millions of unsuspecting users. Some made hundreds of real but content-less webpages/sites with links back to their own - not the phrase "their own" - commercial products - hence the need for objective PageRank and PageTrust. At that time, the search engines were not looking at the following things such as which reciprocal links were owned by the same organization or which chain of anchored links were with the same ISP. In order to thwart the spammer type group, this info is collected and analyzed as it's rather important for determining exactly who the spammers are. Perhaps one of the most important aspects to the backlinking process is in what keywords one uses - traditionally, this has been where many back-link efforts have failed. Why? We can't specifically tell others to use such and such an anchor text in their link to us. Secondly, since as a casual reader, one is not likely to be an expert on long tail keywords, one is going to most logically try to pick the keywords having the most traffic. One could however be forgiven for this as it really is a most logical mistake. A very new online entity, even after being indexed by Yahoo or most search engines, typically has no chance at ranking on its chosen keywords for many months if not years. So, possibly a waste of time, right? The potential problems don't stop there. Initially a new html or htm page has a Google Rank of N/A. Then after its indexed, typically 0 where Zero is not good and 10 is the best. Some may say differently while a new page with N/A or O as its rank can have a freshness quotient that can help it positively, in many search engines, its zero which is evidence of lack of credibility will most likely work against it. Exceptions abound however and if the newly created page is sitting on a highly popular Web 2 social network property like ebay or myspace, bebo or scribd to name a few then it won't be penalized as much just because its current pagerank or credibility level appears to be a zero. And as some will be quick to point out, it is thought that new pages on foundation sites such as those with a PageTrust of 5 or above, inherently acquire some of the PageRank or PageTrust of the site that they rest on. Technical babble galore - the question really is - What really, does one do ? Google's time worn advice, go back to basics, create good and get creative. They would recommend strongly that we even create "link-bait" that will cause others to want to link to you.Which I also recommend if you understand in the faintest what link-bait is. Ignoring Google's advice is always done at your own peril, however I urge you to examine the issues involved in creating link-bait more deeply. Do you really have 3-6 months that it takes to consistently create new articles on a daily basis, and to put out such a ferocious amount of high grade material in one spot that would cause people to socially bookmark that page on your site - If the answer is no then you understand why most of us will never ever intentionally create link-bait. There has to be ways around this. What should one do? About the Author: Have a look at the comprehensiveamount of information on network marketing and search engine optimization tools on Trevor's site. Click and sign up for your Free indepth seo book now. From the Webmaster: "Having the opportunity to share my hobbies and interests with so many people around the world gives me great satisfaction. As a bonus, I blog and produce websites about topics that interest me and receive ad revenue from the websites and Blogs."
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