Online Marketing Blog » link building

Google’s View on Getting Quality Back Links for Your Website

George — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 04:13:50 +0000

In its latest post in the Google Webmasters Central Blog, Google has shared it most latest views on quality backlink for websites. Google has always opposed getting spammy backlink to your site and webmasters all over the world had some confusion about Google’s stand on quality back links. Most of the site owners measure a sites reputation with its back link numbers and Page Rank.

We can easily increase the number of backlinks, but it is more difficult to increase the number of quality links. Quality links means links from relevant pages having healthy page rank, traffic and reputation. Taking these factors of a quality links, one an assume how difficult it is to get a quality backlink to a website.

The latest blog post by Google Webmasters Central Blog has mentioned its view on getting quality backlinks and these would prove useful for webmaster who have doubts regarding the quality links. I have found some important tips and points that has been mentioned in the blog post regarding Google’s view on quality back links, which are very useful for website owners.

1) Community Participations
Getting involved in social media community sites is one of the best way to gain quality links to your site. For example you can join some selected forums related to your website niche. This helps you to clear your doubts, share your knowledge and help others. At the same time you can promote your website link on your profile page. You have to create your reputation within the forums or social media sites you are participating and once fellow users find your tips and suggestions useful, then you are on right path in driving them to your sites. Since they find your website useful, they might also link back to it as well as recommend to others. In this way you would be able to get quality back links naturally, without any forced link building campaigns.

2) Great, Compelling and Unique Content
This is one the most important factors that affect your back link numbers. If you have a great, compelling and unique content, then your would not find much difficulty in getting quality and relevant backlinks.

3) Creating problem solving content
Users always find websites interesting if it contains content with problem solving related issues. This can be something like tutorials, videos, surveys, tools etc, which would be useful for the users. They might refer this site to other users, which may result in getting some good and genuine back links to your website.

4) Go for Long Term Link Baiting Tactics
There are many easy methods of link baiting tactics, but most of them are short lived which consists spammy methods of acquiring links. So when you think of link baiting always go for long term links, as it enhances your reputation and increases your search engine visibility.

5) Avoid Link Buying and Exchange
As per Google buying links and doing link exchange campaigns are one of the worst methods of link building and it should not be encouraged. One should avoid such methods in order to get better search engine visibility. I have already mentioned about the disadvantages of paid links in one of my earlier posts.

6) Submit in Quality and Niche Directories
Directory submissions in one of the better ways increase your search engine visibility and is highly recommended for new sites. But since there are a large number of low quality directories, it is recommended to submit your site in directories which are relevant to your website’s niche and is of good quality.

7) Study Your Competitor’s back links
It is always a good idea to have make a research on your competitors back links and plan your link building strategy accordingly. That doesn’t mean to copy your competitors back link partners, but you can still make a good link building campaign by studying your competitors back links to some extend.

8) Make Your Site Easy to be Linked
Most of your website visitors need not be people with good technical knowledge and hence it is good to make your site easy to be linked. It can be done by adding social media buttons on your site, so that users can easily link your site by clicking on these buttons.

6 Major Off-Page Optimization Factors in SEO

George — Sat, 22 May 2010 10:41:02 +0000

Offpage optimization is the backbone of any SEO campaign and is time consuming. Offpage optimization is a tedious job which needs to be done on a regular basis and one should have the real patience to see the results. Here I would like like to point out 6 major off-page optimization factors that affects your SEO campaigns.

1) The number of backlinks your site have.
This is one of the major off page factors influencing your sites performance and rankings in the search engines. Most of the major search engines pay attention to the number of sites linking back to a website and ranks the website accordingly. So more the number of back links, the better for your website.

2) The relevancy of sites linking back
Site relevancy of the inbound links is another factor which puts more weightage on your backlinks. It is always better to have relevant backlinks as it helps in getting more better and relevant search results in Google. For example if you have a website which talks on music, you should always try to get back links from music related website rather than links from sites related to sports, politics, automobile etc.

3) The quality of the sites linking back
It is much better if the inbound links are coming from high quality sites which has good page rank and Alexa rankings. The linking website or page should be aged enough, have a decent Page Rank and also be indexed by search engines.

4) Links from Social Bookmarking sites.
Links from social bookmarking sites are considered to be a good sign and it is better to get possible back links from the major and high quality social bookmarking sites.

5) Anchor text in the backlinks
To some extend, the anchor text in the backlinks also determines your search engine performance. It is always a nice idea to place your major keywords as the anchor text in the backlinks.

6) The Type of Links
Mainly in the SEO point of view, there are two types of links mostly seen. One is the link with “follow” attribute and the other is the one with “nofollow” attribute. The “follow” attributes are the general and default links that we see and the term “follow” is not necessarily used anywhere in the code. This types of links are considered the best for SEO as it passes link juice. The link with “nofollow” attribute is not considered good for SEO as it does not pass the link juice.

I am sure that I have missed some other points and feel free to comment if I have missed any.

Paid links and their Disadvantages

George — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 07:41:00 +0000

Back links are the links from other site that point to a particular website and are one of the most essential factors of a good website and most of the webmasters try to get more back links for their sites. The links which one acquires by paying for it is known as paid links. Many of the webmasters considers this method as a good method to increase the website’s link popularity, but often they land in trouble.

Search engine giant Google hates paid links and they have mentioned it clearly before. They even has an official form which enables webmasters to report paid links to Google. Even though the back links determines the reputation of the website, it is purely based on the quality of those links. Google does not like links from bad or irrelevant sites and does not encourage them at all. If the links are from quality and relevant sites, Google makes sure that it gives enough point to those back links.

In paid links, some of them come from irrelevant or spam sites, and webmasters use the paid links to manipulate the Google ranking systems. The webmasters engage in buying or selling links that pass Page Rank and pay little importance to the quality of the links, sources etc. Such link buying strategies without caring about the quality may have long term impact on a website. Moreover the buying or selling of back links that pass page rank is violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and hence it can have a bad effect on the search ranking of the site.

The best remedy for this is to avoid engaging in the buying or selling of links. In case you buy or sell links, make sure that you use the rel=”nofollow” attribute, which shows that you are not trying to manipulate your site ranking with that link. This doesn’t mean that Google is totally against backlinks. In order to have a good search engine ranking and popularity you need to have relevant and quality back links. The only thing you need to take care is not to go aggressive with paid links, as they may land you in trouble. So next time you go for link building, try to get it from related and quality sites. Also avoid automated link building systems, which may again land you in trouble with low quality links.