SEO – Back Linking For Gold
The idea that links from other sites to your own, actually aid your site, is a logical one. But can back-links hurt or harm your ranking?
Many of us search engine optimization afficionados know what this terminology means, but for the less geeky it simply means getting links from other sites to your own.
Pre-google, this was done by asking friends and foes to link to you, and this was acceptable for a while but the search engines soon began to devalue these reciprocal efforts because Tom would call Harry, Bella, Davis and Susan to ask them to link to his site and Google particularly thought that this activity was simply contrived and not natural.
Spam is known to many of us as that cheap meat in a can, but in internet lingo its also known as the junk email that attempts to get commercial gain.
As an example, some marketers send out unsolicited commercial spam email to millions of unsuspecting users. Others created fake websites and pages with links back to their own - not the phrase "their own" - commercial products - thus creating a need for Google and other search engines to objectively create quality ranking scores to determine the relationship between linking sites. At that time, the search engines were not looking at some of these things such as which reciprocal links were owned by the same organization or which chain of anchored links were with the same ISP. In order to thwart spammers, this info is collected and analyzed as it's rather important for determining exactly who the spammers are.
It is said that successful backlinking depends very heavily on the keywords one chooses - traditionally, this has been where many back-link efforts have fallen down.
Why? We have no idea exactly how others will link to our online assets. And in direct contradiction to what you might be reading around the net, therein lies a big part of the problem, right?
Secondly, since as a casual reader, you are not likely to be an expert on niche market keywords, you are going to most logically try to pick the keywords having the most traffic. Is this a mistake? A brand new online entity, even after being indexed by MSN or most search engines, typically has no chance at ranking on its chosen keywords for many months if not years.
And perhaps that's not all one has to worry about.
But there is yet another major problem. The page rank of new articles is N/A or after indexing, typically Zero where Zero is worst and 10 is the best. Although some may argue this while a new page with N/A or O as its rank can have a freshness quotient that can help it positively, in most search engines, this zero which is evidence of lack of backlinks will definitely not work in its favor.
But there are exceptions to every rule and if the newly created page is sitting on a very popular web2.0 social network property like ebay or myspace, bebo or scribd to name a few then it won't be penalized as much just because its current pagerank or credibility level appears to be a zero.
We suspect these exceptions work because, it is thought that new pages on foundation sites such as those with a PageRank of 5 or above, inherently acquire some of the PageRank or PageTrust of the site that they are actually hosted on.
Technical babble galore - the question really is - What really, does one do ?
Google would say, go back to basics, ensure that you are putting up great and be innovative. They would recommend strongly that we even create "link-bait" that will cause others to want to link to you.Which I also recommend if you understand in the faintest what link-bait is. Ignoring Google's advice is always done at your own peril, however I urge you to examine the decision to get involved in creating link-bait more deeply. Do you really have 8-9 months that it takes to consistently create new articles on a daily basis, and to publish a huge amount of high grade material in one spot that would cause people to consistently put a link to that page from their own - If the answer is yes, then you now know the true meaning of link-bait.
There has to be ways around this. What should one do?
