SEO - How to know if - to Link or not o Link
The idea that links from other sites to your own, actually aid your site, is a logical one. But can back-links hurt or harm your ranking?
Most of us seo followers have a deep understanding of what this phrase means, but for the less geeky it simply means getting others to link to your site from their own.
Post Altavista if you can remember that far back, this was done by asking friends and foes to link to you, and initially search engines had no problem with this but Google and others soon began to devalue these reciprocal efforts due to not just the potential for spam but because actual REAL link spam that was taking place in this area.
The word “Spam” is known by some as that tasty meat from which the current swine flu propagates,lol, sorry couldn’t help myself, but in internet lingo it is also known as the junk email that attempts to get commercial gain.
Examples of this, many unscrupulous spam masters send out unsolicited comments using software robot programs - to create thousands of backlinks automatically in forums, blogs and other places. 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. In those early days, the search engines were not looking at important minutia such as which reciprocal links were owned by the same person or which chain of anchored links were on the same machine. In order to thwart spammers, this information is deemed to be rather important for determining exactly who the spammers are.
Perhaps one of the most important parts of the backlinking process is which keywords one uses - traditionally, this has been where most linking efforts have hit the wall.
Why? We have no idea exactly how others will link to our online assets.
Secondly, since as a casual reader, you are not likely to be an expert on long tail keywords, one is going to most logically try to pick the keywords having the most traffic. One could however be forgiven for this as it really is a most logical mistake. A brand new website, 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.
And perhaps that’s not all one has to worry about.
The potential problems don’t stop there. The page rank of new articles is N/A or after indexing, typically Zero where 0 is not good and 10 is the best. Some may say differently while a new page with N/A or O as its rank can have a freshness quotient that can help it positively, in many search engines, this zero which is evidence of lack of credibility will definitely not work in its favor.
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 ebay or myspace, 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.
We suspect these exceptions work because, 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 sit on.
Technical babble galore - the question really is - What really, does one do ?
Google’s time worn advice, go back to basics, ensure that you are putting up great and be innovative. They would recommend strongly that we even create “link-bait” that will cause others to want to link to you.And that’s inherently a great idea 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 issue more deeply. Do you really have 8-9 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.
Many more questions than answers, huh?
