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Posts Tagged ‘backlinks’

Backlinks sometimes referred to as ‘page links’ are essential to the visibility of your web pages in the search engines and attracting visitor traffic. Backlinks have three key elements, the web page from which the backlinks come from, the anchor text of the backlinks and what’s on the page to which the backlinks directs the visitor to.

The volume of backlinks

The volume of backlinks to a page is one of the factors the search engines consider when deciding how to position the page in the results displayed to the searcher.

The source of the backlinks

The source of a backlink can pass authority and indeed visitors to the page to which it points. But ‘votes’ passed via backlinks from trusted or authoritative pages to a page have greater influence over the search engines consideration of this page than backlinks coming from pages with lower ‘trust’ or authority. Obvious examples of trusted sources of backlinks carrying higher authority are pages belonging to education (.edu) and government (.gov) web sites..

Google Page Rank

Backlinks from web pages with high page rank (an attribute awarded by Google to each page that it has observed over a period to have attracted, sustained and continued to accumulate relevant backlinks) pass some of their page rank via the backlink to the target page.

The ‘anchor text’

When you see a backlink on a web page it sometimes has a label a word or text associated with the subject at the page to which this backlink is pointing, what this ‘anchor text’ says has influence upon the value the search engines attribute to the link. If the content of the page is about ‘parenting’ and the backlink on the page is labeled or given the ‘anchor’ text ‘parenting’ then the search engines consider this to be of more value to the searcher looking for information related to ‘parenting’ than if the backlink was labeled ‘babycare’.

Common problems

A lot of people screw up their backlinks building activities because they focus on quantity as opposed to quality of backlinks. Having a substantial number of backlinks to your page doesn’t automatically mean the search engines will see your page as relevant.

How to build backlinks

So here is my tried and tested guidance for getting backlinks to your pages, high rankings in the search engine results pages and the right type of traffic to your site.

1. Discovering the right keywords from the beginning is essential.
2. I like to create a keyword ‘cloud’.
3. I most often start with a single primary keyword or key phrase which has substantial visitor traffic.
4. The fastest and cheapest method to find out how much traffic a keyword or key phrase is getting is to use the Google keywords discovery tool.
5. The Google tool displays a list of keywords related to my main keyword and from this list I build my cloud.
6. I then generate content in the form of articles and videos with backlinks with the right ‘anchor text’ to my ‘money’ or ‘target’ page and send these to the various directories.
7. My golden rule is to write content that will attract visitors and compel them to follow the backlinks to my money pages as well as send backlinks.

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OK, this is a multi-faceted subject and I need to emphasise it’s not an exact science. But here is what I have learned in my analysis at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority – simplified

The more authority your site has the higher you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your content. The great news is that authorities trusted by people are also trusted by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. These domains imply they are trustworthy sources of information and it’s a proven fact that as far as Google is concerned backlinks from these domains to your site will contribute authority to your site. Another great example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are largely contributed to by tribes of humans as opposed to a single person.

So it follows that authority is largely influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative web pages link to your web pages then you inherit their influence and as far as Google is concerned you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your web pages by Google increases.

How Google determines what is and isn’t authoritative is undisclosed for solid reasons and aligns with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the net needs is someone manipulating the methods that Google uses in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological asset of this period in history.

Backlinking methods you should avoid

In the same vein it’s worth my while stating some common sources and practices of creating backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘’categorize as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of merit, the common offenders are:

• Paid backlinks – hubs where people buy and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that have links on web pages that are just not associated to the main content.
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
• Fast growth – there are a large selection of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t stupid. Any sudden rise in the amount of backlinks is going to show up on Google’s radar, specifically if it’s a brand new domain.
• Backlinks from unscrupulous web pages – these are particularly nasty as you are guilty by association – need I say more.

*There is another factor where I may be on shakey ground, but reputable press properties appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely observed significant quantities of the same content over and over again on different web sites with no penalties, I am still looking at this, only as a percentage of the results I am seeing go against the normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future post….

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