Guide to Link Building Pt.1
24 October 2006Introduction to Link Development
This document is intended to provide an introduction to search engine algorithms which incorporate linking data as part of their ranking practices. We’ll be looking at historical and current link-based ranking engines plus strategies for maximizing website traffic with these algorithms in order to improve our future link development efforts.
What is Link Development?
Link development is a set of promotion strategies designed to increase the number and quality of the inbound hyperlinks (‘inlinks’) pointing to a given webpage. We’ll be discussing specific strategies later in this document including details on evaluating potential link partners, how to request a one-way link, purchasing link ads, content development for links, link baiting, and more, but first let’s go over some background information on link-based ranking algorithms and link development as a marketing strategy.
Why is Link Development Important?
Link development is a valuable part of any online marketing strategy as it directly influences many aspects of a company’s online presence; including organic search engine rankings and keyword search traffic, referral visitors from links on related websites, and even authority status of the linked site.
Example: Real Estate Website#1 vs. Real Estate Website#2
Both sites offer highly popular real estate services. Website#2 provides a well-designed site that provides useful consumer education resources and tools. Website#1 has a dated design, a poor navigation system, and very little content on the domain.
Yet when we do a search for most popular related terms on Google, Website#1 is ranked #1 for the phrase while Website#2 is a distant #21. Why is the inferior site being ranked higher? For the answer we’ll need additional information from Yahoo’s new SiteExplorer tool.
SiteExplorer is an excellent tool for analyzing links pointing to a given website and can provide insight into why a certain site is ranking well in Google. Google used to provide similar functionality to SiteExplorer but intentionally disabled it in 2005, presumably because it undermined Google’s heavily link-based ranking algorithm. Entering searches for ‘link:www.domain.com’ at Google still return some results, but these results are only a fraction of the total and are often the least valuable links to the site in question.
On SiteExplorer, when we enter a query for Website#2 we get a response that shows 252 inlinks to the URL. This return shows the total number of links pointing directly to the root URL. To get an accurate picture of all the links pointing to the entire domain we’ll want to change the pull-down options on the Inlinks page to say “Show all inlinks ‘Except from this domain’ to ‘Entire site’”.
Using these options we get 555 inlinks to the entire Website#2 domain.
A similar search for Website#1 returns 11,077 inlinks.
Website#1 has over 20x the number of inlinks as Website#2 and this is providing #1 a significant advantage in link-based search engines such as Google. While it’s not necessary for #2 to gain 10k links to effectively compete (quality is much more important than quantity) it does point out the need for further link development if #2 is to be competitive for their most important search terms.
Quality not Quantity
At this point I should mention that although many top ranking sites have inlink numbers in the tens of thousands, large numbers of links are not necessarily required for top Google rankings. Factors such as the authoritative status of the linking site and how ‘on-topic’ the linking pages are can significantly influence the value that Google applies to the inlinks. A small collection of inlinks from topical authorities such as reputable online magazines, trade associations, and educational instituti
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