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What Google Says About Google Bombing Can Teach You About Link Building |
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eMarketing Articles -
e-Marketing: SEO
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Written by Tinu Abayomi Paul
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 Are Some Links Better And, for that matter, should you focus
on sheer quantity of links to your site, or the quality of those links?
For our first piece of evidence, let's ask Google.
In a post to their blog in September, we find the following: “By using
a practice called googlebombing, however, determined pranksters can
occasionally produce odd results. In this case, a number of webmasters
use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link
to President Bush's website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for
those phrases. We don't condone the practice of googlebombing, or any
other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results,
but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to
prevent such items from showing up.”
While that doesn't mean you should engage in the practice of Google
Bombing, by any means, it does give you a clue to how effective it can
be to use the description of the site that is being linked to, where
appropriate.
It isn’t a secret that a sheer volume of links can help you get better
rankings. If you could get 25,000 links legitimately referencing your
site, sure, that would be a great thing.
When you look at the work involved in the reciprocal link process, even
with the powerful tools available on the market today, the objective
would be to reduce the amount of time generating links back to your
site as much as possible. This makes it seem that it's more important
(and more realistic for entrepreneurs and small businesses) to get
quality links, if these links are going to carry greater weight than
their reciprocal counterparts.
While that goes against the grain of the conventional wisdom about
getting better search results, the truth is that search engine
optimization is a bit like adjusting the graphic equalizer on your
stereo. There are several ways you can adjust your settings to get the
desired effect.
In light of that, let's revisit quality link building. What is it?
In general, each link pointing to your site is sort of a "vote" for
your sites contest. But all votes aren't equal. If you sell airline
tickets on your site, pages that are about travel will get a more
powerful vote than a site about butterflies.
And if two pages that have unrelated content link to you, the tie
breaker will be the anchor text, or the words in the hyperlink that is
linked to you. Nirvana would be an anchor text link on a search-engine
favored page that is related to the linked page.
Therefore, a quality link would be the kind of link that carries the
most weight in favor of your site. Since their "vote" counts more, you
don't need to get as many quality links to get the same effect as pure
volume of raw links.
Quality link building, then, is the process by which we discover links
that can help us build more valuable document relationships and favor
getting these over links that create weak correlations.
The lowest quality link to my site would be a raw link like http://www.freetraffictip.com , on an unrelated page.
A better link would be one that links to me using the phrase free
traffic, on an unrelated page. The fact that they use a phrase that is
descriptive of my site to link to me, put that link in a better
context, so that even when it’s from an unrelated page, it’s even
better.
Slightly lovely would be a raw link to my site that was on a page that is related.
The best I'd hope for would be a link that uses the phrase free traffic
from a page that has something to do with any topic related to traffic
generation.
There are even better scenarios than that, but they are only in play
when you’re in control of the link pointing back to you. In the
meantime, from watching what Google itself has said about Google
Bombing, you can learn that not all links to your site give you the
same voting weight.
The question then becomes, why do all that extra work if you can get the same benefit with 25% of the effort?
Why indeed.
Associated Tags: e-marketing Google links traffic internet site search engine
This article is an excerpt from a discussion
of linking. You can view or participate in this discussion at
http://www.freetraffictip.com/linking for more, with reference links to
resources around the web. |
