DAY 18: Understanding Links

“The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.”

- Sydney J. Harris -

Good links, bad links

Before going any further with our off-site optimization training, it’s important to fully comprehend our tools, here they are links.

Today, we are going to learn what links got to do with SEO, what we should expect out of our inbound links, and more importantly, what kind of links are wasting our time and efforts.

Linking and SEO

When people talk about SEO, they only think of inbound links. Some become even greedy and start to stop linking out, nofollowing their outbound links, and other dirty practices.

They are the kind of people who take it all and give nothing back.

Though it may seems like a good idea for short sighted people, I strongly believe that there’s much more to gain by being natural and honest.

An external link is like a testimonial that you appreciate and refer what’s on the other side.

Most of the people who don’t link out are afraid to lose their “link juice”, what they fail to see is that there’s a lot more to benefits than it seems to link out.

Linking Out

History has show to us countless times over and over that the people who gain the most are people who give the most.

In SEO and on internet in general, when you link out to a site, one benefit you can gain from the search engines is network association, and if that site is an authority one, you surely want to be associated with it, even if it is indirectly.

When you link out, your visitors and your readers respect you more and find you more trustable and in turn are more willing to link to you.

Being Linked In

As I explained earlier, giving a link to somebody is like giving a testimonial or recommendation for this page.

For the search engines, it would be counted just like casting a vote.

The more votes a page would get, the more it would appear to be appreciated and trusted by the internet users, thus the better the search engines should rank this page.

This concept is true with all the search engines, but especially with Google, which even has created a scoring system called PageRank.

As you understand this, it becomes clear that our goal as SEO is to acquire as many backlinks as possible.

Now, just like everything in the world, when it comes to SEO and link building, quality over quantity always prevails.

Each quality backlink we will acquire will have influence over our Link Authority and/or our Link Popularity.

Link Popularity

Link popularity refers to how many links are pointing towards our specific page. Although the concept is simple, there are some simple rules to follow in order to maximize benefits from our work:

• Pages with high PageRank score provide more popularity value, also called “link juice”.
• Multiple links coming from a single domain are highly discounted and hardly bring more value than having just one.
• Link popularity is more about how many links from different domain name source you are acquiring than how many links in general you have.
• Only links that can transmit “link juice” will affect your popularity score.
• Relevant links (coming from the same category topic) will carry more popularity than irrelevant links.

Link Authority

Link authority refers to what the links pointing to your pages are telling the search engines. Put simply, it refers to what anchor text is used by the person linking to your page.

The anchor text is the small piece of text used when you create a link:

This anchor text tells the search engines what your page is all about. Understanding this concept, the more people link to your pages using your keyword, the more the search engines will consider that your page is relevant for that specific keyword.

Using proper Anchor text is the key to successful off-site optimization.

Keep in mind that the search engines like things to be or look as natural as possible and abusing keywords in your anchor text may lead to an over-optimization penalty.

The best way to prevent this is to vary your anchor texts and make them look as natural as possible.

This is also another reason why I recommended you earlier to optimize your post using multiple keywords, this way; you’ll be able to provide much more varied combination of anchor texts giving it the necessary “natural” feel that Google likes so much.

I recommend you to have your anchor texts with a length of 2-8 words long in average.

Unhelpful Links for SEO

As I explained earlier, all links are not helpful for SEO, and some people are ready to play some dirty tricks with you.

“nofollow” attribute

Links that have this attribute attached to them do not pass link juice at all, you won’t benefit from it.

Meta Robot instruction

Another method used is to add a line in the head of the source code of a page with the following meta command:

Any link on such page will not pass link popularity at all.

Robots.txt file

Even trickier are people placing this kind of instruction in a robots.txt file.

No cache or with old cache

Regardless of the PageRank of a page, you want to check the cache history of that page.

If the search engine can’t cache the page, they can’t keep record of your link being there; likewise, if the cache of a page is old, over 2 weeks it’s likely that the search engines have stopped to crawl this page for whatever reason; this means that your link won’t be crawled and noticed even if is follow and a high PR page.

No PageRank

Pages with no PageRank can’t help you improve your link popularity for the simple reason that they don’t have any to give.

Also keep in mind that what count is the PageRank score of the page you’ll have your link on, not the PageRank score of the site linking to you.

If a site has PageRank of 6, but it links to you from a no PageRank page, what you get is a worthless link from a no PR page, not a link from a PR6 page.

Exercise

Read and re-read this lesson until it all make sense to you, the understanding of those concepts is what will make the difference in your competition for the top ranking position for your keyword.

Link building is one of the most important work you can do in SEO,and it’s extremely time consuming. It’s very easy to waste a lot of your precious time building useless links for your site. Learn to identify quality links, and how to avoid useless one for your own benefits!

If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson below.