Internet Marketing

You have perhaps been told that getting links from other sites related to your own website genre is generally a good idea. Perhaps you have even gotten many email requests to this effect.

Most of us search engine optimization followers keenly know what this term means, but for the non technical it simply means getting others to link to your site from their own.

In the past, this was done by exchanging links between sites, and this was acceptable for a while but Google and others 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 it is also known as the email that floods your inbox and makes it difficult to find your real mail.

As an example, too many enterprising spammers send out unsolicited blog comments to thousands of open blogs in an attempt to gain back links. Some made hundreds of real but content-less webpages/sites with links back to their own – not the phrase “their own” – commercial products – thus creating a need for Google and other search engines to objectively create quality ranking scores to determine the relationship between linking sites. At that time, the search engines were not looking at important minutia such as which reciprocal links were owned by the same person or which 20 reciprocal links were with the same ISP. In order to slow down spammers, this info 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 failed.

Why? We can’t specifically tell others to use such and such an anchor text in their link to us. And in direct contradiction to what you might be reading around the net, therein lies a big part of the problem, right?

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 site, even after being indexed by Google 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.

Ergo, have we looked at a potentially time wasting effort here?

The potential problems don’t stop there. The page rank of new articles is N/A or after indexing, typically Zero where 0 is worst 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 many search engines, its zero which is evidence of lack of backlinks will assuredly work against it.

But there are exceptions to every rule 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.

As the examples of exceptions above clearly show, 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? What can a novice do ?

Many seo experts might say, go back to basics, content and be innovative. They would recommend strongly that we even create “link-bait” that will cause others to want to link to you.I like both this phrase and the thought if you understand in the faintest what link-bait is. Its never a great idea to truly ignore what Google recommends, however I urge you to examine the issues involved in creating link-bait more deeply. Do you really have the 6-18 months that it takes to consistently create new articles almost daily, and to publish a huge amount of high grade material in one spot that would cause people to socially bookmark that page on your site – If the answer is yes, then you now know the true meaning of link-bait.

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