Archive for February, 2010

After quite a long break, we’re going to get back into it!

Linkbuilding, whether we like it or not, is hugely important in SEO. Links are what set Google apart from the rest of the search engine crowd, and what makes them the multi-billion dollar company they are today. Back in September, 1998, two young men thought that websites should be judged by the number and type of external links a website had pointed at it, as opposed to solely focusing on on-site features.

One of the most difficult parts of linkbuilding is deciding what a given link is “worth”. Not so long ago, we relied solely on Google PageRank as it appeared in the toolbar. This is not a terrible way of deciding how much a link might be worth, as PR is in some representative of how influential a website is (as PR is based mostly on the amount and type of incoming links to a site). However, just getting a link from a PR 6 website might not be worth what you think it is. As toolbar PageRank is only updated approximately every 3 months (sometimes more like 4 or 5 months), it is impossible to say what a site’s PR is at any given moment. Matt Cutts’ has confirmed that PageRank is a dynamic quantity, and is actually changing day to day.

So can you use PR as a measurement for working out the value of a link? You can to a point. Check out the following table to work out how much a link from different levels of PR is worth…

As you can see, as a general rule PR is worth 5.5 times as much for every level you go up.

When Google crawls a page and analyses all the data and content on a page, it uses something called latent semantic indexing (LMS). LMS does something that I don’t understand, but I’ll give it a shot! LMS, while still being a Google “robot”, tries to analyse a page in an almost human-esque fashion. LMS allows Google to see if a link is placed around other links, in related content, in content that bares no relation at all, in a footer etc. LMS can be your best friend or worst enemy. LMS can often tell if your link is natural and genuine, or part of a reciprocal link exchange or a bought link.

In saying all of the above, valuing a link is mainly about using common sense. Follow some of these pointers:

• Make sure that any link you are getting is related to the page that it will be pointing to (if not, the link may be worth less than nothing at all!)
• Avoid link farms. You can spot these as they will be pages that just contain a number of links with no useful content.
  • (Google can spot link farms a mile away now. Don’t risk it!)
• Avoid reciprocal link exchanges where possible.
  • At worst, try 3-way link exchanges

As always, I would love some comments, so let me know what you think!