The Secrets of Building Links and Increasing PageRank

Links are important to Google, Yahoo and MSN in determining where your site is placed within the search results. As you probably know, the more links, the better you will place.

The engines place a weighting factor on each link. That is, a link from an important site like CNN.com would count for a lot more than Jimmy Bob’s personal homepage.

Google calls its importance-scoring system “PageRank,” and it’s been a fundamental building block of Google’s ranking algorithm since day one. Tactically improving the PageRank — or, more generically, your “link gain” across all the major engines — of your homepage and of key internal pages of your site is critical to being well-ranked and thus getting traffic.

Links are the currency of the Web, so it is important to have a plan in place to improve the number and quality of the links to your site from the outside. That is the idea behind link building.

Link building can be approached a number of ways. You can, for example:

Garner links from vendors, clients, business partners
Garner links from other related sites
Garner links through general directory entries, like Yahoo
Garner links through specific directory entries, like a marketing services directory if you are a marketing consultancy
Sponsor organizations and get acknowledgement through a link from their Web sites
Create content and syndicate through RSS so that other sites will post the content contained within your RSS feed on their sites with a link back to your site.

It is not just about the importance of the page, or the PageRank score. You probably get bonus points for a link from a topically relevant or authoritative site, so target topically relevant sites in particular when link building.

By the way, the worst kind of link building is sending unsolicited email to Web masters asking for a reciprocal link. Web masters get inundated with such spam daily.

Each page within a Web site is assigned its own PageRank score by Google. PageRank scores run from 0 to 10 on a logarithmic scale, meaning that the gaps between the integers increase logarithmically the closer you get to 10. So, for example, the gap between the 3 and a 4 is quite small, whereas the gap between 7 and 8 is huge in comparison. As such, boosting your PageRank from a 3 to 4 would be quite easy, and going from a 7 to 8 would be quite hard. Another logarithmic scale you might be familiar with is the Richter scale. As you probably know, a 5.0 on the Richter scale isn’t such a huge deal, whereas a 7.0 is a very big deal indeed.

You can check your PageRank score several ways. One is using the Google Toolbar, available for download from toolbar.google.com. It works with Internet Explorer (for Windows) and with Firefox, users of which also have access to an alternative toolbar with a PageRank meter available at www.prgooglebar.org.

You can also check your homepage’s PageRank score using the Google Directory at directory.google.com — assuming, of course, that you are listed in the Google Directory! If you aren’t listed, you can submit through the “Add Site” link at the bottom of the appropriate category page where you wish to be listed.

Listings on Google Directory category pages are ranked in order of PageRank score. This means it is possible for you to see your site make small PageRank shifts relative to other sites in your category, particularly if there are a number of sites listed on your category page. (If you are curious where your site sat in comparison to others listed on that category page in the past, you can get historical PageRank scores using the Wayback Machine available from Alexa at www.archive.org.)

A word of caution: don’t be overly focused on what that little green PageRank meter says. PageRank values shown in the Google Toolbar are imprecise, months old and not the same as the PageRank that is used in Google’s ranking algorithm. Google realizes that it’s really only search engine optimizers who care about the PageRank scores, and they don’t want to be too helpful to SEOs. So PageRank scores should be treated as merely indicative, and so you have to take them with a grain of salt.

PageRank as an algorithm is alive and well, and will adapt with the times. One way we can probably expect to see it evolve is with the incorporation of “TrustRank”, a concept where a small number of reputable seed pages are used to help differentiate good pages from spam.

There is a tactic called “Google bombing” whereby linking to a site with particular words in the link text can get a site highly ranked for those keywords in the search engines, including Google, Yahoo and MSN. One of the most famous Google bombs has been George W. Bush’s biography page on whitehouse.gov being ranked number one for the phrase “miserable failure” –even though neither the word “miserable” nor the word “failure” appear anywhere on Dubbya’s page. It was the sheer power of the inbound links with the link text that did it.

Not all links from a high PageRank-endowed page are equally as good. For instance, if there are a great deal many other links on that page that link to you, you will end up with only a small share of the link gain that has been passed down, as you are sharing it with the multitude of other sites linked on that page. The fewer the number of links, the better.

Reciprocal links are likely to get discounted. Search engines have a fantastically comprehensive link map of the Web, so they can spot reciprocal links easily. As you can imagine, getting your golf buddy to link to you and you, in turn, linking back isn’t as useful to the search engine users than an industry resource site linking to your site, because it is relevant and useful for that link to be only one way.

Links from affiliated sites (those on the same IP range or host name) will likely be discounted as well, as will footer links located at the bottom of all the pages site-wide.

Some types of links are just bad news. Google warns not to link to what it calls “bad neighborhoods.” These would include link farms and search engine spam sites, in fact don’t participate in “link farms” or FFA, also known as free for all sites, at all. (If you’re wondering how to identify a link farm from a directory, link farms tend to be less organized and have more links per page.) When you get emails inviting you to get a link submitted to many thousands of search engines and directories, do not respond. At best, these sites are irrelevant. At worst, which is most likely the case, they consist of link farms and bad neighborhoods. The results of participation can be devastating and include ranking penalties or even the banning of your site.

One of the keys to garnering links is to offer link-worthy content and to keep that content fresh. You can proactively solicit links. If you do, you need to do it carefully. I recommend the following process:

Step 1: Identify suitable link targets

Review links of competitive sites and sites in your keyword market. SEO Chat’s PageRank search tool is very handy in identifying link targets with high PageRank scores. With it, you can conduct Google queries and have the tool return the results in order of PageRank score rather than relevance.

I use the tool several ways:

Checking backlinks of competitors’ sites
Checking keywords relevant to the client’s industry
Using the site: query operator to restrict results to specific TLDs (top level domains) and countries

One downside of this tool (and of Google’s backlink checking in general) is that the backlink searches are not comprehensive. It is only a sampling of the total number of backlinks, and those backlinks are only to the page specified, such as the homepage, and not to the entire site.

On the other hand, Yahoo offers a query operator linkdomain: that allows you to see all backlinks coming in to any page on the site. Furthermore, Yahoo allows you to further restrict a linkdomain: or link: search by subtracting particular sites from the search result. For example, you could do a linkdomain: query on Yahoo and subtract your own site from the search results, seeing only inbound links from other sites into your own, rather than seeing pages of your own site linking to yourself.

Step 2: Contact them and try and persuade them to link to you

You can beg, borrow or buy a link. (But I doubt you could steal one, although the blog comment spammers and guestbook spammers have managed to steal links to some degree of effectiveness — a very bad thing.)

How could you “buy” one? You might be able to obtain a link by “sponsoring” their organization with cash or “in kind” services or by buying text link advertising on their site through a broker such as Text-Link-Ads.com.

You could suggest a link as a site visitor, or you could contact them representing yourself from your site. If you represent a site visitor, you should probably give them some additional constructive feedback besides inclusion of your link. For instance, in the same email let them know of any broken links on their site that you have spotted or of any other suggested links besides your own.

Remember, offering a reciprocal link in exchange is not a viable approach, because their link to you will not be worth as much once the search engines pick up the fact that you link back to them.

If this approach sounds oversimplified, it is. Link building is arguably the most challenging aspect to search engine optimization. It’s anything but straightforward; the process is fraught with landmines; and the outcome is largely outside of your control — since you can’t dictate who links to you and who doesn’t.

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Comments

Good Piece of Work. I feel the best way to increase inbound links is to build Good Relationship with fellow webmasters

[…] Search Engines Love Blogs You may recall from my article in November, “The Secrets of Building Links and Increasing PageRank,” that the major search engines all rely heavily on links to decide which Web sites are worthy of a top ranking. Blogs are looked on quite favorably in that regard, because the blogosphere is so rich with interlinkages. Bloggers link to each other constantlyâ??from blogrolls, to trackbacks, to “hat tips.” Accordingly, blogs seem to get special treatment, particularly from Google. […]

Linking is important and I agree that reciprocal linking is past its prime.

But still, content is the most important aspect to the Google score – combined with accurate keyword representing in title tag and url string.

I syndicate content and that seems to do the trick for my link building.
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Good article. It would be nice to get some more advanced techniques or some things that can go under the radar but are still white hat. But nice work nonetheless.

This is the best list of guidelines I have seen on link building. I also agree with your position on reciprocal linking.

However, there is an important technique you have missed. Online and offline PR campaigns. Because of their nature, media sites tend to have high PageRank scores. Articles placed in print are generally also posted online. If you have a PR function in your organization, it is important to coordinate with online marketing efforts.

[…] Tactics for On-Site Optimization Link Building: How SEOmoz Built One Million Links in 33 Months, The Secrets of Building Links Content Optimization: Holistic Search Engine Optimization Bookmark to: Sphere: Related […]

I completely agree with the article. We all need to think in the way that Google will recognize the links that are not well made and therefore give them a low grade. The low grade links as the article says can be because of the different reasons so link policy and thinking about how to make links look natural will help everyone vastly.

a fundamental tutorial for linkbuilding.i can’t find anything to disagree with..

Great article…I’m starting to see the huge importance of using links. I never thought outbound links would be that important. Very interesting and very complex.

I will be applying your techniques, focusing on quality vs. quantity. Thanks…

I agree with Thilak, that the best way to increase inbound links is to build Good Relationship with fellow webmasters.

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