Methods of Link Building

Posted by Jorjeo Iveniscovich on May 10th, 2009 | no comments

Developing a proactive marketing strategy that will provide a consistent stream of good quality web traffic is not an impossible task. To get traffic you need a significant presence and to gain a presence you need firstly a good site that Google can read and understand, and secondly a network of high quality links to your website from many other authority websites.

Although this sounds quite difficult and complex, reasonably easy to achieve because of all the systems that are around that can do it for you. First though, you need to grasp the concept that not all links are equal. Google Page Rank is a good indicator of how much a link from a given site will be worth. Google ranks pages 0-10, 0 being the least valuable sites that is knows about, and 10 being the most valuable and popular sites. Below rank 0 or n/a means either that Google isn’t aware of the sites existance or that you should avoid that site because it has been blacklisted.

In a perfect world, we’d all have lots of links from the home-pages PR-10 sites, however the fact that there are only around 10 PR-10 sites that exist somewhat hinders this approach, and those 10 or so won’t usually link to many other websites because they don’t need to, have nothing to gain from it, and would never stop receiving link requests. Even slightly lower PR sites, like PR-7/8s are very picky about who they link to. These highly ranked sites are known as “authority” sites and tend not to link to lower ranked sites (not very often anyway) because they simply have nothing to gain from it.

The goal is to get lots of websites with some PR or the potential to get some PR reasonably soon to link to you. So what that means is, identifying a site as new (hasn’t been online long) and has no PR, but that is building links in order to get some PR. Identifying these type of sites is a good long-term method to adopt as you never know what sites are going to be the next PR-8s, 9s or even 10s in a few years time. The PR you will be given when Google review it (around every 6 months) will be based on the amount and the quality of the link juice you squeeze out of all the sites that link to you. The higher PR sites you get links from, the higher your PR will be.

So how does one go about getting these links together? Well, that is just the question. You can hunt down sites online that seem to link to other sites. There are quite a few sites about that provide reciprocal linking. The flaw with these is that reciprocal links aren’t really worth a great deal any more (although they are woth something as sometimes two-way links are natural eg.customer & supplier etc.they’re just not worth much). This is because the major search engines have cottoned on to the arrangement being made between sites with this type of link, they have therefore begun to downgrade their worth.

The most effective way to get to the top of the search engines is through one way linking, or to put it another way, getting good websites to link to you without you linking back to them. This, as you can imagine, is not easy. Why would a quality site link to you anyway? Some might actually like your website, service or information and link to it as a reference for their own visitors, but in the main they will want something in exchange for the link.

If you only have one website this is a problem, if you have two websites this can still be a problem if they are hosted in the same place as they will have the same IP address and so will appear to be the same site. There are several answers to this problem, but one way link management is the easiest way to go.

With one way link management your site is entered into a triangle-like arrangement in that your website (website A) links to website B which links to website C which links back to website A (you), soo effectively, you will all benfit from a one way link, and if this process is repeated (ie. one way link management), you will be rewarded with a rise in the rankings as the search engines cannot track this type of linking, therefore it appears natural.