SEO Techniques: Link Building

Inbound links are one of the main factors for ranking well for competitive keywords. But only number of inbound links can't do the job for you. Inbound links are only helpful when it is a one-way link or a relevant link for your site. That's why there is always two opinions regarding link building.

Link Building and Its History

It started off long back when Google implemented the Pagerank concept in the Search Algorithm. Webmasters all over the world started misusing them for their own benefit. Concepts like Link Farms and bad neighborhood came into effect. Thanks to Google that took evasive measures to tackle this kind of spam through their numerous updates.


Link Building for Google

From my experience I can say that it is really tough to make your way to the top ten in Google for competitive keywords. Google considers Link as a vote of support from a site to another site on the web. And for that you have to pick quality links. Editorial links are the preferred ones but even links given out by other sites are appreciated. Link bought through any kind of network or Paid Links are the typical links that can harm you in the process and the effect may vary from poor performance to getting banned from Google.


Link Building for Yahoo and MSN

For Yahoo and MSN the case is different. If you have proper structure with great navigation, content, and few numbers of links, then you have good chance to rank for fairly competitive keywords.


Important Point to remember while Link Building

1. Do not link out to bad neighborhood site.
2. Always check the link provided to you.
3. Before giving a link out to any site think how it would help your visitors.
4. Getting a link from related site is much more appreciated.
5. Check the Anchor Text and the position of the link.
6. Check the Anchor Text of the link pointing out to the site linking to you.
7. Prefer directories for best one way links.
8. Editorial links are preferred ahead of other links.


Effect of Links in Search Engine Ranking

The followings are the metrics that Search Engines consider when weighting links. All these can affects rankings positively or negatively.

1. Anchor text (when it matches queries, it can have a significant positive impact)
2. Placement on the page
3. PageRank of the linking page
4. Trust in the linking domain
5. Link structure in HTML (inside an image, javascript, standard a href, etc.) - although Javascript links are sometimes followed, they appear to provide only a fraction of the link weight that normal links grant. Likewise, links from images (and anchor text in the form of alt text) appears to provide somewhat less weight than standard HTML links.
6. Nature of the link (when it appeared, how long it stays on the page for, etc.) - can affect how much weight the link is given and be used to identify patterns that may indicate manipulation
7. Use of nofollow
8. Relevance of page content to linked-to page
9. Relevance of site to linked-to page
10. Text surrounding the link
11. Number of outbound links present in the linking page
12. Previous link relationships between the domains (if the page/site has already linked to the page/site in the past, it may be given less weight and this may also be used to identify and discount reciprocal linking schemes)
13. Hosting relationships (if the domains are hosted on the same IP address, or same c-block of IP addresses, the link may lose some of its weight)
14. Registration relationships (if the domains share registration information, it may be interpreted as less editorial and given less weight)


Factors Affecting Link Building

1. The traditional mutual linking between sites. This process is termed as reciprocal linking. However, the SEO’s are of the opinion that this strategy of link building has been diminished by Google. There is also a belief that the better strategy of building links with sites of relevant content.

2. The three-way link (also known as triangular linking) is the method of linking the site A and site B for a link back from another site. It is a much developed and modern strategy of link building than the two-way method. The Two-way linking is not in practice since they seem to be similar to the one-way linking to Google. However there are Search Engine optimizers who are of the opinion that the Google identifies three-way linking and there is often the risk of penalties.

3. This is the three-way link method where linking is done from a different site instead of a link from the site A. The benefit of this type of link building is that there is no need of the outbound links in case of the site A. However the SEO’s are of the opinion that site A might be have to suffer penalties from Google.

4. The four-way linking is favored by few webmasters. They have the same advantages and disadvantages like the number two and number three methods as discussed above.

5. Article links: An informative article with links displayed in the middle or at the end of the article. These articles are provided to the webmasters free of cost as content for their sites in return of the link in the site of the client. There is a belief that the publication of the article on different sites might result into some problem since it has the duplicate content and the links of the articles are also similar. A number of these articles are submitted to “article farms”. It is advisable to offer unique articles on the webmaster but producing many of the unique articles is often expensive.

6. One-way link is also considered to be effective. Even though these one way links come from the sites having low page rank these are considered to be effective. However SEO’s are of the opinion that one-way link from FFA’s and the directories are considered to be spam by Google. It is essential to find out related sites in order to avoid being marked as spam by Google. However, this method seldom works.

7. Buying Links - This is the technique of buying text links along with keywords. It is stated in the guidelines for webmasters that Google does not support buying of links. There is also a method of reporting against the sites that buy links. Few of the SEO’s think that Google creates this fear among people so that people buy Adwords instead of advertising somewhere else. The SEO’s also believe that buying banner ads is better than text links since Google cannot consider them as Spam. If the text based ads are sponsored link then text based ads are not a better idea. Some SEO are of the view that if there is no keyword in the link anything can be done for reputation. It is also possible to detect reputation from site where the banner is.

8. We consider A as the site that we are trying to promote. The best strategy is to create various information sites with relevant content on the different IP C-blocks in order to “take the fall”. If you follow this strategy then site A will receive links from links from other sites like site B, C and D. The sites B, C and D participate in the different linking activities with the purpose of creating Page Rank. This might be considered spam.

9. You can also build a site naturally. The best way is to create excellent content. It is an easy way to promote a site that is informative but is not ideal for commercial site. However it is pretty time-taking affair.

10. It is a combination of all the above strategies. However, Google can punish a site for any of the strategy and may not be aware of the strategy.