Archive for December, 2008

While it is generally true that having lots of links pointing to your site will improve its ranking in Google, there is a lot more to it. To make it difficult for the system to be gamed, Google almost certainly have models of linking that represent the patterns and time-scales expected from genuinely popular sites.

Here are some quick tips intended to make to think about your linking strategies a bit deeper:

Numbers: most incoming links should be from low PageRank sites. This is because most sites out there have a low PageRank. If the only incoming links come from high PageRank sites, Google will smell something fishy. Ideally for every link you get from a PR5+ site, you should have dozens or even hundreds from sites with lower PR.

Pattern: chicken or egg? A recent post at Digerati suggests that the optimal pattern is to get a link from a highly trusted resource first (even if you put there yourself), and then get lots of “run of the mill” links. This feels natural - following the initial exposure on a trustworthy site, many people decided to also make a link.

Otherwise, if hundreds of “run of the mill” links suddenly appear, and Google cannot plainly see how they heard of you, it might look spammy.

Time: take plenty of it. This isn’t always an option, but slow organic growth will seem more genuine. A site that grows by 2 pages a week will be more trustworthy than one that has 1000 pages on day one. The former will seem like a site belonging to someone with a love of the topic, whereas the latter looks like they are on a mission to get search traffic.

The same goes with links. If your site appears in 500 directories overnight, you obviously used a submission service. Link building should be as slow and steady as you can tolerate.