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.

In a nutshell, just to catch you up to speed, PageRank has no direct relationship with how or where your site appears in Google’s search results. But that does not mean it has no value.

A web page temperature guage

PageRank (PR) has a direct association with the number of incoming links to your webpage, and to some extent is also affected by the number of outgoing links from that webpage. Incoming links increase PR, while outgoing “leak” it.

One of the most important factors in gaining search result visibility is the number of incoming links to a page from elsewhere. See the connection? If your PR is increasing, that’s a good indicator of the general health of your site or page. If it is decreasing, get out there and build more links!

Page rank sculpting and the passing of influence

With the number and potency of incoming links as important as they (currently) are, it is easy to see how PR can be considered an indicator of influence and authority. High PR pages “pass on” PR to those pages into which they link. This is easily tested: have several high PR pages point to a low PR page – using your selected keywords in the correct manner, of course – and watch not only that page’s PR increase, but also watch it climb the SERPs. You may not achieve the ultimate goal, but you will see positive movement.

With a large site containing many pages that have their own PR, it is possible to “push” this PR influence to target pages, thus raising thir SERPs visibility purely with internal linking. Internal linking… now is not that a great deal easier than external?

Creating silos, or living in the PR culdesac

PR “leaks” out to pages when you link to them. The rate of leakage is low so there is no fear of completely draining a page’s PR. Controlling the “Flow” of influence within a website is a very potent tool in building higher SERP visibility.

Silo pages take all the incoming PR they can get their grubby little hands on and hold it tight, not letting a single drop seep out particularly outside the site, but also within it. To build the influence and authority of a particular page on your site, have many incoming links to it while reducing its outgoing links to an absolute minimum. If you do need to link out, use the “nofollow” attribute to prevent passing (leaking) the PR influence.

There is some discussion around fears that silo pages may appear to be unnatural entities to a search engine and may be penalised as a result. In experiments with directly managing the PR flow around a site,I have not personally seen this, in fact, very much the opposite.

Do not keep it all in the family

Internal linking to control the PR flow around a site is increasingly important to ensure the pages you want to float higher in the SERPs, do. But it must never be an exclusive linking technique.

Incoming links from elsewhere remain vital, particularly from unconnected sites with highly relevant content – and a big, juicy PR to boot. Such links are hard to acquire, but when combined with strong management or internal linking, may land you within striking distance of the top.

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.

Every link must count

Link building effort, whether as a result of active placement of links yourself or by other sites organically lining to your great content, is impotent if the search engines are not aware of the page linking to you, and therefore not aware of the link. Most advice on link building you’ll find around the web, excludes one critical, additional task: ensuring pages that link to you are indexed in the search engines.

If you create the link yourself in whatever method, you will be aware of where that link has been placed – providing you are sensible and record the locations of your links, of course. But what about organic links, how can you discover where they have been placed?

Who links to you?

If a search engine already knows about a page that links to you, all is well and there’s nothing more for you to do. To discover which links fit into this category, simply perform a search in the following format: link:yourdomainhere.com. Every page returned will have within it a link to the domain you entered. But what should concern you are the pages that link but do not show from this search.

Logs, logs, logs

Whatever system you choose, whether it be visitor traffic logs provided by your web host, the free Google Analytics, or some other logging service, you should be able to access detailed lists of refers: where people came from when they visited your site.

Scour your refer logs and check every site you have not already checked (you’re keeping records, right?) to see if that page is in the search engine index. Do this by placing the entire page URL as a site search, like this: site:referdomain.com/page-that-sent-the-visitor.html. If no pages are returned, then that page is “unindexed”.

Linking out

The best way of letting a search engine know about a site or page is to create a link to it. When you discover an unindexed refer, link back, it’s as simple as that!

Where you place that link back might depend on the structure of your site, or you may want to place the link back on a completely different site to avoid direct reciprocal – or two-way – linking (managing non-reciprocal linking like this is a whole other subject and beyond the scope of this post). In its simplest form, create some kind of “Sites that link here” page, containing all the unindexed refers you have found.

Check them after a couple of weeks and if the page has found its way into the search engine, remove the link from your site.

Time and effort

Scouring through refer logs for unindexed pages may seem a troublesome task, but with the amount of effort needed to link build in the first place, it is vital to squeeze as much value from that effort as possible.

Try to imagine that each link pointing towards your site is like a beam of light from a torch … The more links pointing to your site and the more powerful they are, the brighter your site will shine, making it easier for Google to “see” what’s in your site when they’re looking to see if you’re relevant to a searcher’s query.

Content creators have complete control over where we shine our torch beams, through deciding where to point our torches, but also through use of the ‘nofollow’ directive

nofollow – don’t follow this beam, thanks

Too many outgoing links from a web page or blog post can ‘leak’ a site’s limited supply of light energy. The simple addition of rel=”nofollow” to a hyperlink informs Google to ignore the light emitting from that link, therefore protecting our own limited pool of light energy from being spread too thinly elsewhere. Google not only ignores the light, it also refrains from following that link to its destination to see what’s there, while humans can still see and click the link to visit the destination.

Spammers love links

Links are the primary method search engine spammers use to boost their money-earning sites in the search engines. So-called “Black-Hat” practices include the creation of hundreds of websites all interlinked into a network. When a site is created, this network is used to shine hundreds of torch-beams at this new site, thus making it shine and getting it noticed.

Search engines (Google in particular) are continuously improving their methods to spot and down-rate such link networks, demoting the value of their collective torch-beams, and tagging them as ‘bad neighborhoods’. And here we have the potential problem.

You cannot control your incoming links

Just as it makes sense not to link out to – thus creating an association with – so-called bad neighborhoods, I expect you can see the potential pitfalls of receiving incoming links from such places. A link creates an association between the two sites being connected.

Search engine spammer sites frequently use content ’scraped’ from RSS feeds – it’s easy and it’s automated, leading to a constantly updated, never ending supply of content. In most cases, the scraped content will also include a hyperlink back to its originating site. If your content has been scraped, you could have your site associated to a bad neighborhood through their link back to you. Without your knowledge, your image with the search engines could become tainted.

Sinister SEO

I have never seen it happen to a site I have run, but the principle of negatively affecting your competition through tainting their site with bad neighborhood backlinks has been much discussed in SEO circles. In theory, it is possible.

A case for “noarrive”

You have no control over who links to your site, but if you discover less than reputable incoming links, it might be appropriate to request Google ignore those links, tagging them as being irrelevant to your content: the mirror image of the nofollow directive.

This discussion suggests having Google provide a list of backlinks to your site, attached to which is a ‘delete’ button to remove the association of that link from the Google index.

I propose being able to add a directive to your site’s robots.txt file to instruct Google to ignore links from specific domains or IP addresses. This provides more control and a broader scope to limit potential damage once the tainted back-link has been discovered. This ability would also kill any deliberate competitive damage to your site’s image with the search engines through tainted back-links.

Conclusion

Issues with negative effects of links – deliberate or otherwise – are never going to be eliminated entirely. As the search engines get better at filtering genuine connections from manipulated ones, so the manipulators find a new tactic – it is inevitable. But any tool we can employ to minimise such negative effects will inevitably lead to search engines providing more accurate and valuable search results to the searcher – and that can never be a bad thing for the internet as a whole.

Photo: Peter Mueller