Search Engine Optimization News and Views

The idea that links from other sites to your own, actually aid your site, is a logical one. But can backlinks hurt or harm your ranking?

Many of us Search Engine Optimization experts keenly know what this phrase means, but for the rest it simply means getting links from other sites to your own.

In the past, this was done by exchanging links between sites, and whole communities even encouraged this but the search engines soon began to devalue these reciprocal efforts because Tom would call Harry, Bella, Davis and Susan to ask them to link to his site and Google particularly thought that this activity was simply contrived and not natural.

Spam is known to many of us as that cheap meat in a can, but in internet lingo its also known as the email that floods your inbox and makes it difficult to find your real mail.

As an example, some marketers send out unsolicited commercial spam email to millions of unsuspecting users. Others created fake websites and pages with links back to their own – not the phrase “their own” – commercial products – hence the need for objective PageRank and PageTrust. At that time, the search engines were not looking at the following things such as which reciprocal links were owned by the same person or which chain of anchored links were with the same ISP. In order to stop the spammer type group, this data is collected and analysed as it’s rather important for determining exactly who the spammers are.

It is said that successful backlinking depends very heavily on the keywords one chooses – traditionally, this has been where many back-link efforts have hit the wall.

Why? We can’t specifically tell others to use such and such an anchor text in their link to us.

Secondly, since as a casual reader, you are not likely to be an expert on long tail keywords, you are going to most logically try to pick the keywords having the most traffic. Would this be the correct thing to do? A very new online entity, even after being indexed by MSN or most search engines, doesn’t stand a prayer for getting traffic based on the most highly trafficked keywords – sorry but this wait for traffic could extend to many months or even years.

And perhaps that’s not all one has to worry about.

But there is yet another major issue. Initially a new html or htm page has a Google Rank of N/A. Then after its indexed, typically 0 where Zero is not good and 10 is the best. Some may say differently while a new page with N/A or O as its rank will have a freshness quotient that can help it positively, in most search engines, its zero which is evidence of lack of backlinks will definitely work negatively against it.

Exceptions abound however and if the newly created page is sitting on a very popular web2.0 social network property like squidoo or craigslist, bebo or scribd to name a few then it won’t be penalized as much just because its current pagerank or credibility level appears to be a zero.

And as some will be quick to point out, it is thought that new pages on foundation sites such as those with a credibility level of 5 or above, inherently acquire some of the PageRank or PageTrust of the site that they are actually hosted on.

All sounds rather complicated huh? So, what’s a girl to do?

Many seo experts might say, go back to basics, content and get creative. They would recommend strongly that you even create “link-bait” that will cause others to want to link to you.Which I also recommend if you have any idea what this link-bait thing means. Ignoring Google’s advice is always done at your own peril, however I urge you to examine the issue more deeply. Calculate whether you really have 8-9 months that it takes to consistently create new articles on a daily basis, and to publish a huge amount of intensely likable content in one spot that would cause people to consistently put a link to that page from their own – If the answer is no then you understand why most of us will never ever intentionally create link-bait.

There has to be ways around this. What should one do?

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