Link Building is used to improve natural search engine rankings by enhancing a website’s link popularity. Google, Yahoo!, and MSN consider a website’s link popularity along with link quality when determining its ranking position for keywords.
Google uses an algorithm called PageRank to determine a website’s worthiness. Google explains link popularity on their Technology Overview page located at – http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html.
Google states:
“PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results. PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.” When considering link popularity and PageRank, Google considers the volume of inbound links, the quality of inbound links, and the growth rate of inbound links. Not all Inbound Links Pass Link Popularity Search engines may only be recognizing a fraction of the inbound links pointing to your website.
In particular the following link types DO NOT pass link popularity:
1) No-Follow: Google created the rel=nofollow link attribute to combat spam. Primarily, this attribute was created to eradicate blog spam, but has also served major websites like Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers. It is common for a large portion of inbound links to include rel=nofollow within the link code. Google, Yahoo!, and MSN all disregard links with the nofollow attribute.
2) Tracking Codes: 99% of all banners and contextual ads utilize tracking codes, which allow the ad publisher to count the number of impressions and clicks the ad generated. Tracking technologies use redirects to track outbound clicks. These redirects strip link popularity before it reaches the destination URL.
3) No-Index, Robots.txt, and Indexing: Many pages on the Internet are not indexed by the major search engines. This is because (a) the page has not yet been discovered by a search engine spider, (b) the page includes the No-Index META tag, whereby the webmaster is specifically asking that the page not be indexed, (c) the page is included as an exclusion within the robots.txt file, or (d) the page is banned from the search index. Any link residing on a page that meets any of the criteria above will not be counted towards link popularity.
Inbound links should always look natural.
Search engines have developed sophisticated radar systems to ensure that the proper websites are being rewarded for proper linking strategies.
What is the proper way to demonstrate the proper inbound link mix?
1) Landing Pages: Alot of times you will find inbound links pointing only to the index or home page of a website. When developing website authority it’s important to point links to pages throughout the website using relevant anchor text from incoming sources.
2) Link Growth: Websites that naturally receive huge spikes in inbound links generally continue receiving consistent inbound link growth. If you build a bunch of inbound links quickly this can set off alarms, especially if you cannot consistently add new links. Link growth is an important component in the trust (like page rank) algorithm of search engines and a proper strategy is necessary.
3) Anchor Text Diversity: The highest ranking or top ranking websites demonstrate a very diverse backlink (backlink is another term used in place of inbound link) collection. 50-75% of all backlinks should be branded, i.e. the anchor text should use your brand name, not a specific keyword. The remaining anchor text should be keyword focused. It’s important though to not overly target one keyword in the anchor text, otherwise the backlink structure will look unnatural.
Content Worthy of Linking is The Greatest Link Building Strategy Of All Time
There are a ton of sites on the web that have massive amounts of links pointing to them and that never had a professional “link building” campaign run for them other than a great content strategy. This is important to note because almost everything you read about link building focuses on “push” methods of “designing” link popularity.
The pull method of link building is what most extremely popular sites use. It is a common myth that great big, popular sites use big SEO firms to help them get where they are. SEO firms mainly deal with mid to small scale sites who, whether they admit it or not, don’t want to work as hard at building something of value that would attract voluntary links and buzz.
Other website owners see people using SEO firms and manufactured link popularity and think this is the way everyone must do it.
Just remember that there are big bloggers out there who are wildly popular and don’t know a lick about SEO or link building in the technical sense. They never had to learn complicated SEO or part with thousands of dollars to have a link building campaign run for them.
They just got creative, got busy being social, and made sure that enough “big mouths” saw their content to have it passed around the web successfully. This leads to the kind of link popularity any site owner could desire and does not require automation software, directory submissions, or mock popularity campaigns to pull off.
If you aren’t a creative type, partner up with someone who is and let their content be the engine that drives links and rankings to your site.
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