Why are links so important? The basics.

Think of a backlink to your page as a  ”vote” for your content. The more backlinks; the more votes. And the more popular your page can be considered to be about its chosen subject.

But it’s not all about the numbers; not all links are equal. Search engines assess each link pointing to your site as to its value. They consider site-wide links in footers, blog sidebars, etc as low-quality links. Links within the body of text content are rated much higher because they are much less easily manipulated. The text around the link gives the page, the link, and the destination of that link, context. In our modern internet world, context is king.

One-way links are valuable, but are also the most difficult to achieve. Why should an influential website link to your, possibly competitive content just because you want to become more visible in search results? It is this difficulty in establishing high quality backlinks that is the key to their importance.

Linkvana one way links with almost no effort

The Linkvana system consists of a large network of carefully maintained blogs. Each blog is a basic, text-only site, each with the same category structure, and all spread across different web hosts – and therefore IP addresses – across the globe.

Your links are automatically distributed across the Linkvana network based on your preferences, and each link is a unique, one-way blog content link pointing to your website.

This creates good quality backlinks to the pages you need to enhance. Each link is contained within a single blog post that you create. Each link exists within a 100-word minimum blog post that is then distributed to a single blog on the network. No duplicate content, and your link sits within text content and therefore has context.

This does involve a little effort on your part in creating each 100-word blog post  for each link. Linkvana recommend each post be of a natural, personal journal/blog style which, once you get in the swing of it, take just a few minutes to write. If you are really stuck for time, Linkvana will even create the post for you, for a small $2 fee per post.

Linkvana is not a link-farm

Link farms, if you are caught using them, can be bad. They consist of a network of hundreds, or thousands of websites, usually blogs, that are strategically inter-linked. When you purchase from a link farm, your link will appear potentially many thousands of times across their network.

Such links are relatively low quality (hence the relatively low cost per link), and though can be effective in giving a boost to your SERPs positioning, you risk receiving a penalty from the search engines. Google are particularly sensitive to this kind of backlink generation.

Multiple projects and multiple links

A Linkvana account can manage a number of Projects, each being a collection of links to a particular website. Project preferences consist of nothing more than establishing the target URLs of the links, the keywords to use to create the link, and the frequency of the distributed blog posts.

The system allows a number of posting strategies, from a few posts per week, to 2-5 posts per day, or use their “humanize” algorithm which automatically varies the rate of posting to make it appear as natural as possible.

This automatic distribution is the key to the value of this system. It enables you to create a large number of posts all at once, then leave them to be distributed automatically. Consideration is made for where and how these posts are placed ensuring your links end up across multiple blogs over multiple host servers and IP addresses.

For a fixed monthly fee, your account can have a number of projects and any number of links/posts within the system. If you have just a single website, the subscription might be expensive, but if you are link building to multiple websites, this is, in my opinion, the most cost effective way to build context-relevant, one-way links.

Does it work?

In a word, Yes!
I have tested the system since November 2008, across three different websites. Exclusively using Linkvana to build links to established websites in some competitive keyword spaces, I have seen a 45% increase in traffic, starting within two weeks of the first Linkvana posts. Most importantly, those pages saw almost a 50% increase in earnings from Google adsense placed there.

For a site containing nothing other than quality duplicate content (PLR articles) and created under a brand new domain specifically for this test, I used Linkvana links exclusively and saw the site begin to rank quickly and rise above the other, more established sites containing the same content. The results were not spectacular, but no exclusive, narrowly focused link building campaign will rocket a site to the top of the SERPs.

I believe this form of link building is of relatively low risk of punishment from search engines. Your links are not “spammed” across thousands of websites, and each one is contained within original, contextual content. Linkvana invest a great deal of effort in maintaining the health of their network of blogs, manually approve the content being placed, and do not permit link building into “black-hat” websites, thus helping to preserve the integrity and value of their sites.

Like any single link building strategy, it should not be used exclusively as the broader the source of links to a website the better.  But as a solid, reliable, cost-effective and manageable system of actively building inks, Linkvana is invaluable.

The Duplicate Content Filter

Google dislikes presenting multiple search results that contain the same content. Instead, it decides which is the most authoritative original source of that content from all the duplicates it has in its index, and presents just that one. The rest are filtered into the supplementary index – all that extra content you can see when you see something like this at the end of your search results:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

An experiment to become the authority

I wanted to test the power of backlinks as an indicator of authority above all else. The outline of the experiment is straightforward:

1. Create a brand new website
2. Fill it with content that already exists on other, more established websites
3. Create back-links pointing to it
4. Do not market the site in any other way

I am not going to link to the site itself here, as I am now isolating it from normal, organic link targets to perform another experiment.

Content for the site was selected from some freely available PLR (Public Label Rights) articles which can be legally reproduced. Such articles are also generally already published elsewhere. In my case, a search for specific chunks of article texts showed most articles had already been published across 6-10 other websites, some new, some quite established.

Getting indexed

Adding a link to the footer of a very healthy blog got the brand new domain added to the Google index within 24 hours.

Building back-links

In addition to the main purpose of this test, I also used it to try out link building service Linkvana. A full review of my experience with Linkvana will be here soon, but in a nutsheell, it provides the ability to create unique backlinks from a plethora of specially managed blogs, but without the potentially damaging drawbacks of usinga link-farm.

Over a period of three weeks I used Linkvana exclusively to create just 15 back-links into the new content, both deep-linking and to the home page.

The outcome

After just a week of link-building, searching for specific chunks of my published PLR text returned my site at the top of the search results, with all the other pages containing the same PLR article, pushed into the supplemental index as duplicate content. This despite all the other sites having the advantage of greater domain age and having already published that content.

The conclusion

Duplicate content is one of the most discussed, and misunderstood, aspects of Google’s search alorhythm, but can be overcome with pure link bulding.

The number of quality links pointing at duplicate content, seems to be the primary metric for assessing that site’s authority. Of course, this assumption must be tempered against any existing authority held by other sites with the same content.

It’s a matter of respect

Underpinning ethical, high quality SEO and online marketing techniques is the need to work with the end user in mind. And that premise must be extended to commenting on other blogs in order to create links to your site – or “blog seeding” as it is sometimes called.

When does seeding turn into spamming? Simply when the link generating comments offer no genuine contribution to the discussion.

Avoiding the dofollow switch-off

The term “dofollow” refers to links that do not contain a rel=”nofollow” attribute – something the majority of blog systems add to comment links by default in an often ineffective attempt to reduce spam. Search engines ignore the links created with “nofollow” and so such links have no SEO value.

Lists of “dofollow” blogs appear in abundance on SEO forums and groups, resulting in a flood of spam-like, worthless comments from low quality link-builders. Consequently, the blog owner tires of all the necessary comment filtering and dilution of the comment discussions, and switches back to “nofollow”.

Just a little consideration on the part of the commenters, and this switch-off can be avoided.

It is a transaction

We should consider the opportunity to comment on a blog as a priviledge. Adding a link to a website within that comment, is a transaction with the blog owner. The commenter provides value to the blog’s content, in return gets to leave a potentially valuable link.

If SEO comment link builders followed this notion, we would have so many more “dofollow” blogs on which to comment.