Beating the Link Building Filters

 

It's no secret that search engine optimization and link building are on an aggressive rise in popularity. For example, according to a recent cars.com survey, about 55% of car dealers are investing in search engine marketing to generate online sales leads. (Survey Report: http://www.autoremarketing.com/ar/news/story.html?id=5141) That is a big change for these types of companies from what they have come accustomed to doing over the years.   With this rise in popularity search engines like Google, who strive to be the absolute best at accurate data retrieval based on a user query, need to find new ways of identifying what belongs at the top of their engine and what is optimized (or manipulated) to be there.   To do this effectively they need to build algorithms which identify not only methods of search engine optimization, but trends that follow. One of these trends no doubly is web links, where they come from, and how they link to you. Today, links are a major tactic for search engine optimization and those working to increase their search engine rankings, thus they are also a major target for Google with their ever changing and sophisticated algorithms.   In fact, this popularity in link building has spawned and entire industry of "Link Brokers" and "Text Link Marketing" sites, services, and companies. Not pointing to anyone specific, but I'm sure if you asked any owner of one of these text brokerage companies, they would be quick to tell you that "Business has been good".   But how long will this text marketing phase stay effective for search engine optimization? What is Google doing to stay above the industry and remain king of search? Well, it really depends on who you ask. Every optimization specialist and experienced search engine marketing professional will have a different answer trying to predict and prepare for where this market is going.   Not too long ago, Matt Cutts, a Google engineer who has become overtime somewhat of what I would consider a webmaster public relations spokesperson, revealed on his blog that: "Reputable sites that sell links won't have their search engine rankings or Page Rank penalized .... However, link-selling sites can lose their ability to give reputation (e.g. Page Rank and anchor text)."    This is a pretty powerful statement. This tells us that not only is Google examining links, but they are also measuring up the sites where they come from. So if a site is found to be selling links, Google may zap its Page Rank assigning power and that the anchor text used in your ad won't help you as far as ranking for those terms, a tactic that has proven extremely effective in the past.   Now for people out there paying handsomely for those PR9 and PR8 links, it might be a good time to start rethinking your strategy; it's not all about PR.   Taking into account that Google is more than likely doing this already, we would need to try and identify the "trends" they would be looking for. One of these trends would be sites that have large numbers of unrelated outbound links, outbound links in footer areas of websites (which are generally paid advertisements or belonging to some sort of link exchange or link trade), or possibly even links in the side bar areas of websites where advertisements are likely to be. One thing is for sure, Google must find a way to accurately identify the validity of links and how to measure them. Considering the fact that Google, although amazingly intelligent, is far from human, it boils down to page characteristics. If I am reading an article, I'm most interested in the main body of the document. Whatever is on the bottom or at the sidebar may not necessarily be of value to me. In most cases it may not even be related to what I am reading. It's an advertisement, most of the time. Thus "article marketing" is born. A simple and effective way to gain links to your site within bodies of text. Make your own judgment.   At any rate, many webmasters have gotten hit with the last few updates made by Google. Sites that have ranked highly for long periods of time are now shuffled to the bottom of the deck. A lot of sites that got hit, at least from what I have seen, are sites with very little high quality, on theme topic relevant links pointing in. Sites that were using link manipulation tactics like cooperative advertising networks and link exchange programs are on the list of unhappy webmasters. Not in ever case, but many. These are the things that Google is looking for, and they must find and identify them to keep their index clean.   So if you are building links to your web site in hopes of increasing your search engine rankings, remember one important thing: when it comes to search engines, links are like friends, it's not how many you have, but how many you can really count on. Choose them wisely.