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It’s no secret that buying links can lead to ugly penalties that can drop an otherwise well-behaving site pages down the SERPs or even out of them altogether. Yet some gray area certainly exists as far as what is a paid link and what is acceptable. (more…)
Once you have your website up and running, you may be shocked if, after a few months, you aren’t getting any visitors and you’re still in the dungeons of the major search engines. If you have good content, lots of SEO and a great product or service, what’s keeping you from being seen? It’s most likely your lack of links. The importance of links to your site’s placement in the most popular search engines can’t be underestimated – links tell the search engines how popular your site is with others who are on the web.
You could, of course, simply submit your site to a paid links site that promises you “thousands of links” for your site and hope that whatever they throw at the wall sticks, but that may not be your best bet. After all, search engines are increasingly savvy to how links work, and if your site has hundreds of links that aren’t really relevant to your product or service, your link popularity will probably remain quite low in the rankings. On the other hand, what help is there in having highly relevant links in limited numbers? It is this balancing act between link popularity and link relevance, or pop that is so hard to maintain. Finding the right balance is essential.
Link Popularity – The Case for and Against Numbers
Every site should try to cultivate multiple links to their site. One-way links from other sites to yours indicate that lots of people are interested in what you have to offer, and search engines do recognize this link popularity and reward it in the rankings. Reciprocal links are also a good way to increase your presence in the search rankings. With reciprocal links, you can show up in searches for your own product or service and searches for the products and services of those sites you’ve linked to.
The down side to this type of linking is that you can also be penalized in the ranks if you have hundreds of links – one-way or reciprocal – to sites that have nothing to do with your own site’s purpose. It’s why submission to paid linking services can be a bad idea – if you end up linked to sites that are too diverse or questionable in their content, you’ll drop quickly in the ranks. A site selling baby clothes linked to hundreds of baby product and care sites will do well. A baby clothes site linked to thousands of sites peddling porn, vitamins, diuretics and auto loans won’t.
How to “Pop” – Understanding the Importance of Quality
When establishing links, be industry specific – a handful of links from other sites that are focused in some way on your industry, whether it’s cleaning products, income tax preparation or natural food supplements will help pop you closer to the top in the search engines. If you make natural herbal teas, look for links to natural health and living, teas and natural cures – all inter-related topics that are relevant to what you offer.
Industry directories are also a great place to submit links that are high quality. Why? Because the larger directories are set up with complex search capabilities. Their category descriptions, Meta tags and keywords all result in highly relevant, top quality links. Because they were designed expressly to make finding particular industry information easier, a lot of time and effort has gone into the links and how they are interconnected.
Links are “graded” by the search engines based on complex algorithms that detect not only how many links there are to your site, but how relevant those links are (keep the whole diuretics/porn links problem in mind) to your own product or service. A higher relevancy score in the search engines gives you more weight based on the authority of the sites you’re linked to. Will ten incoming links from little-known sites equal one link from a site featuring recognized experts in your field? One hundred? One thousand? Or will your small cache of links from big, important sites count you out because everyone else seems to have thousands of links, relevant or not, compared to your hundreds?
The fact is, the algorithms that determine which sites are the best are evolving daily. A balance of link popularity and link “pop” is essential to being recognized by search engines and moving up through the rankings. Once you’ve achieved that status, however, you have to maintain it. That means constantly “tweaking” the links to and from your site – fine-tuning both number and relevance – in order to maintain your spot. Finding the proper balance and adjusting your Internet presence to optimize both content and links is a never-ending process that, when done properly, can place you on the front page of the best search engines.
[tags] link popularity, quality links, SEO, paid links, one-way links, reciprocal links [/tags]
Text links have increasingly been the topic of discussion for websites around the globe recently. The importance of keywords and keyword phrases and direct paid links is well known. However, what many individuals don’t realize is that keywords or phrases mentioned in relation to your own site on other sites can be just as powerful in driving traffic to their site or sites, even if their site isn’t optimized for those words or phrases.
How is that possible? It’s because certain phrases are very popular and very powerful and can lead to an incredible number of links that you, the site owner, haven’t even thought about. Often, reviewers, bloggers and other sites will use a particular phrase to indicate their take on your site’s product or service and link to you. Used often enough, these text links can actually indicate to search engines that your site is the best possible answer to anyone searching for those phrases.
Good Text Links Gone Bad
One famous example of this is the phrase “miserable failure,” which, until recently, would result in a top-ranked result of “whitehouse.gov/president in Google and Yahoo searches. Google has since removed this result, but it’s an interesting example of how important it is to be seen as the expert in your field or the right result for a particular text link. Because so many people indicated on websites around the world that they felt the president was a “miserable failure,” search engines thought that the best possible site to direct searchers to was the site for the president.
A less controversial example is the Abode site, which pops up near the top of any searches for the phrase “click here.” The Adobe site isn’t optimized at all for this phrase, but so many other sites use the term “click here” in reference to Adobe that search engines assume that Adobe is the best possible site for information on the phrase “click here.” Fortunately for Adobe, “click here” has been entirely positive. Not so for the president and “miserable failure.”
Link Popularity Services Can Increase Text Link Results
A simple way to explain the importance of text links is that they are essentially votes for your site provided by the many other sites on the Internet that have a text link for your site. In the world of web popularity, text links are popularity votes that are tallied by the search engines. No matter how much you optimize your site, if you don’t have lots of relevant text links to you coming from other locations, you aren’t going to rank high in the search engines. You want to rank high for things relating to your product or service.
Link popularity services can give your site valuable insight into how you want to be presented in order to establish you as an expert in your particular industry or on a particular subject. Interestingly, you don’t have to strictly be an expert on the industry itself; in fact, being an expert on something that is a part of that field or related to that field may net you remarkable results, generating numerous text links that will draw visitors to your site.
An example would be a site that sells swimming pool and spa parts. You may find that placing yourself as an expert on swimming pool care, proper spa maintenance and how to clean and protect your pool or spa will generate tons of links from other sites. In fact, you’ll probably get more links this way than by being an expert on just swimming pool parts themselves.
Link popularity services are essential to helping a website develop a two-pronged approach to increasing text links and therefore link popularity which will drive websites up on the search engine rankings. First, a good service will help you develop a reputation as an “expert” with articles and content that will give your website clout. Second, these services should determine what truly relevant content that will generate relevant links is. After all, the swimming pool and spa parts store doesn’t need a thousand links from sites that talk about hotels with swimming pools. The magic combination is to establish text links that are relevant and diverse (from many different sites and sources). If you can find this, you will quickly establish yourself as the expert in your field and your site will move into one of the top slots in major search engine results.
[tags] text links, paid links, link popularity, link popularity services [/tags]
Taking a closer look at what Google’s official stance is, you’ll find that Google doesn’t condemn outright companies who sell or buy links. In fact, they state on their site that, “Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results.” And here is where Google’s new campaign runs into trouble. How does one decide what links are for “advertising purposes” vs. “manipulation of search results?” Google has asked that Internet users report sites that have paid links. It’s a laughable suggestion – how does anyone else on the Internet know whether you have paid for a link or not? They can’t. And this is why, although some people may temporarily “go underground” with purchased links, the practice isn’t going to stop. It’s a good thing, because these links increase competition and encourage growth and change – two very important aspects of a dynamic marketplace. Whether you buy a link or receive it unsolicited, it’s going to be useful and relevant. If it weren’t, the link wouldn’t show up in Google’s algorithm anyway.
Finally, Google suggests that those who buy links are “buying PageRank.” PageRank isn’t for sale – particularly since it is owned by Google. The algorithm removes or penalizes non-relevant information in search results. If the information is relevant, it will improve rankings. To that end, it doesn’t matter at all whether that link was paid for in cash or trade.
[tags] buy links, sell links, report paid links, paid links, pagerank [/tags]
