One of the key factors affecting where your site ranks in the leading search engines is the number of quality in-bound links to your site.
Like most other factors that affect search engine ranking this has been widely abused and misused by website owners (and SEO professionals) with many sites buying, exchanging and otherwise obtaining links that have no value to the search objectives of real people.
As part of Google’s continuing campaign to improve the relevance of their search engine listings Google’s Stefanie Ulrike Durr last week laid out Google’s position on what constitutes a good link
and good link strategy.
In short, links should be earned not obtained. In other words links obtained through exchange or purchase (”spamming tactics”) are of less value to your site than organic links to your site by virtue of quality content, ‘relatedness’ or other forms of user-oriented usefulness.
Links obtained through the old-fashioned manner of buying, exchanging or other means of non-contextual or irrelevant means are actively (or so they say) being discounted by Google. Reading between the lines it would seem that this retains some page-rank enhancing value so perhaps shouldn’t be utterly written off just yet as a tactic, particularly for more competitive markets.
The other search engines may lag behind in this latest push for relevance but from both a user point of view and and SEO point of view its great to see another push in the right direction: meritocratic rather than thanks to the size of your SEO budget.
As often happens in the SEO world clients are promised the world in terms of inbound traffic and improved Page Rank thanks to the SEO’s directory submission prowess and linking strategy. Fact is that there are only a handful of worthwhile general directories. Add to that the industry specific directories for your market and that should conclude your directory strategy. Focus instead on positioning your company’s site as a genuinely useful resource with compelling content and useful resources. This way you earn those valuable inbound links plus position yourself as an authority in your niche.
If you want to check the inbound links to your site just write the following command in a Yahoo search bar without the single quotes ‘linkdomain:yoursite.com’
or if you want to exclude internal links just write ‘linkdomain:yoursite.com -site:yoursite.com’
The equivalent in Google only displays a sample of the links to your site so is misleading.
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.
Leave a Comment