Sep
15
Why is linking so very important?
September 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment
I had a client ask me this question recently. The answer is pretty simple really … and all in all it’s for a very good reason.
Authority.
It seems to all boil down to authority, or … importance … or whatever word you want to give to it … it’s the main reason “why” your website is ranked where it is.
Let’s trip back when Google first appeared on the scene. The search world was pretty much awash in irrelevant search engine results. You could search for something and come up with a whole page full of results that hardly even touched upon the subject you were searching for. A better method for search engines to rank pages was being begged for.
Google appeared and one very large part (if not the largest) of their algorithm was what we today call “inbound links”. Google looked at all the links on your site. They noted what sites you linked to, and what text you used within that link. Above all, they considered a link “away” from any website to be a good positive vote for the other site. After all, when someone willingly lets their users know of another website that may be interesting to them … and further … willingly sends them there … it must be for a good reason.
This “human” vote is a very good indication of the quality of the other site. This became the one driving force behind Google (in my opinion anyway) that made them the success they are today.
Of course it was discovered over time that this is what is behind the Google algorithm and people began this long quest to generate inbound links. Originally everyone jumped onto the bandwagon and began trading links with anyone and everyone. This had a short lived boost in importance as Google (of course) caught on to this and relevancy became the buzz word in regards to links.
Now everyone wanted inbound links from sites that were relevant to the same market your site was all about. So a link from a shoe store was a fairly good match for the guy who is selling socks. This made getting links harder to get because not everyone who is running a store wants to link out to anyone who is in the same market. Fear of competition made inbound linking become harder and harder.
Well, I don’t want to go over the entire history of linking and what all of us SEO types have had to slop through over the years since Google came on board … but this little scenario should be enough to educate you as to why links are so important.
Today, we still need and want these inbound links. The way we get them has undergone change after change after change … and the change has even undergone change … lol.
There are lots of ways to get links today … none of them exactly easy, and of course, the relevance is still of primary concern. As is the importance (PageRank) and authority of the site that links to you.
That more or less covers this lightly which is all I wanted to do, but I want to mention spam here as well, for those of you who are actively learning about linking and are heading off now to do some.
There is software available for inbound linking that automates the process. I’ll discuss this type of thing more in another posting. A rule of thumb is that whenever something becomes automated, it’s probably not going to work for you. Think of automation as “automatic spam”. That is generally what it is.
These automatic linking programs will add senseless content in the way of comments to blogs all over the internet. Here is a very, very good example of it.
This blog has been out of commission for quite a while. I’ll bet it’s been six months since it was corrupted and went offline. I reinstalled the software behind the scenes and then simply left it alone. I didn’t have time to post even one posting … or in reality, get myself ready to being running the blog again. It’s a daily (or at least regular) commitment.
During this time I received hundreds of “comments” on … the one default posting that comes along with the install. This is a “Wordpress” blog. When you install a Wordpress blog you get one posting that is titled “Hello World”, with a very short paragraph saying that you’ve installed the software.
I had comment after comment after comment telling how “wonderful this posting is”, how the person leaving the comment “agrees completely”, they go on and on .. “I learned a lot”, “you are certainly right and I agree with you”, etc., etc., etc.
Well … sheesh … there is no posting there to begin with!!!
So how on earth is any automated script going to help you when that it what you get … really.
You need to do this linking yourself, without automation, and with leaving intelligent and informative responses. Afterall, these comments will be read by a human … not only by the engines. What you really want it to have someone visit your site, as well as get the inbound link from the blog.
Oh … remember … lots of blogs today put “no follow” tags on the comments so you won’t get a blink from every blog out there. Do your due diligent research to find this out.