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Monthly Tip Blip – Step Right Up and Use these Linking Controls!

July 28th, 2009 • By: Eli • Tips

link-building-gold-men In the link building business, there can be many obstacles to getting real and relevant authority to flow to a site that doesn’t get it naturally with high quality content. However, as most people are aware by now, there are definitely ways to push authority to almost any site, even those that are unpopular or otherwise irrelevant. Collectively, these techniques are almost entirely black hat or at least gray hat, because of the dubious nature of their overall positive effect on search results. Search engines and webmasters took a dim view of this pursuit, became very concerned with result quality and came up with various ways to try and discount their effects. However, it’s very much worth noting that while attempting to minimize the impact of SEO on their results, the same search engines have put tools in place to allow for much more refined optimization when used correctly.

The most well known of these tools is the NoFollow attribute used with href tags, which was introduced by Google over 4 years ago. Although the original intention was to prevent PageRank from flowing to other domains that may not be trustworthy or relevant, it has since evolved into a tool used for page sculpting on one’s own site. The best possible example of this is Wikipedia, which uses NoFollow extensively to keep any external links from taking authority away from their pages. It’s obvious to most search users that Wikipedia ranks amazingly well for a ton of search terms and that’s certainly no accident, since they use NoFollow on the outbound links of every article, while all of their internal links are DoFollow. So in essence, they get a lot of PageRank naturally because it’s a useful site, but they also keep every drop of it due to their deliberate and consistent use of NoFollow.

Despite its prevalence, NoFollow is just a small example of the extensive tools provided by search engines that have no other purpose than to view and customize on- and off-site link profiles and view a website how the engine sees it. Google, Yahoo and Bing all provide high quality, comprehensive Webmaster centers with a ton of unique tools.

So, while third party tools are often excellent works and offer valuable insight, it’s also very clear that SEO can be done, and done well, with minimum expenses on software. Despite the secret nature of their individual algorithms, most search engines are surprisingly open about how they work so it’s really no wonder there are so many imitators around. Thus, today’s tip is to use the tools provided by the engines you’re trying to connect with; there is a reason they provide them.

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