What Google Says About Google Bombing Can Teach You About Link Building
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.
About the Author:
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.