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Link building is credibility building

May 29, 2008

A website’s search engine credibility is measured in terms of its perceived importance by other websites. Other websites consider a site to be important by linking to it. Acquiring those inbound links, or votes for credibility, are vital to achieving high rankings on the search engine results pages.

One-way inbound links

The most valuable links are those from other sites where your site does not contain a link back. Factors to consider are:

Site reputation

The source site should be reputable. Very often that may be obvious. One measure of reputation is Google’s PageRank. In its simplest form PageRank is a measure of inbound links (the algorithm is actually much more complex than that). As such, the system has been abused over the years by high volumes of low-quality links. So its true value is questionable.

Another measure is Google’s TrustRank. Unlike PageRank this score is not published by Google and is therefore less open to manipulation. The components and criteria of TrustRank are the subject of much speculation. One theory is that it starts with a seed list of manually scored high-quality sites. Then there is an automated process that scores sites by following links out from this hub. The closer to the hub, the higher the score. This mechanism would make it almost impossible for low-quality sites to obtain any sort of reasonable score.

But in any event, the goal is to get links from sites that are obviously reputable and steer clear of the dubious ones.

Relevance

The subject matter on the source (link from) page should be relevant. The search engine spiders can determine this by looking for similarities between the wording on the source page and the wording on the linked (your) page.

High volume = low value

The fewer outgoing links on the source page the better. The value of the link to your site is proportionately diluted by the number of outgoing links.

Link anchor text

Link text that is relevant and keyword-rich is much better than using your web address or ‘Click here’ or something like ‘Go to YourCompanyName’.

Vary link anchor text

Wherever possible, the anchor text on different source sites should vary so that the search engine spider interprets the links as being natural rather than part of some sort of artificial link building strategy.

Gradual

Build inbound links gradually rather than many at the same time. Again this gives the impression of a natural increase in popularity rather than an artificial link building strategy.

Consistent URL naming

Be consistent in the format of your URL in the outgoing link. For example, http://yourdomain.com and http://www.yourdomain.com will both link to your home page, but the spiders will see them as being different URLs and dilute the ranking value accordingly.

Spread the links

Get links to pages other than your home page to indicate site credibility rather than home page credibility.

Reciprocal links

This is a simple exchange of links between two websites (or to be more precise, between a page on each website). For many years reciprocal linking has been the mainstay of link building strategies. But this has made it too easy for sites to acquire high volumes of inbound links and give a false impression of their popularity. Reciprocal linking should be avoided except in genuine circumstances where it makes sense to exchange links. There can be little doubt that having high volumes of two-way links with irrelevant sites will add nothing to your site’s ranking value and may even be harmful.

The same message applies to triangular or more complex circular linking strategies (mini nets). Google and the other search engine companies did not invest millions of dollars in their ranking algorithms to be so easily fooled.

Where reciprocal links are used, the quality factors for inbound links are the same as those for one-way links.

Filed in: Search Engine Optimisation