Sohaib Thiab – The Story of an Internet Entrepreneur

I thought I should post a topic geared towards SEO only this time, we all know how having links pointing to your website can effect your rankings, especially on Google, simple? maybe, some think any link from any website can boost your rankings, that’s why you see people running spam scripts that post comments on blogs and guestbook’s, taking advantage of the blog/guestbook script to gain hundreds and sometimes thousands of back links, well guess what, Google can pick those up!

Yes that’s correct, Google can pick such spam links and cut them out, and either penalize the website their pointing to, or give no value for those links at all. we’ve seen lots of websites loosing their rankings after the “Jagger” update in 2005, you now know why lots of websites lost their long held page 1 rankings on Google.

Link building isn’t as easy as it used to be, link exchanges are now being found and ignored by Google, so you can forget about sending emails to other websites requesting a link exchange, best case scenario is that you can get some traffic from the other website, especially if its related to your website, but you can forget about improving your rankings from link exchanges, I still get emails from webmasters requesting a link exchange, I either ignore/delete the email, or respond with a polite/short explanation of why I don’t exchange links anymore, BUT if the other website was interesting, I offer the other webmaster the option  of a 3 way link, where he links to my website (A), and I like to his website (B) from a 3rd website that I own (C).

While this is a solution, I really think that’s its temporary, with the advancements in the algorithms such links will be found, especially if all of the websites that are used for 3-way link exchanging are hosted on the same IP address, its the easiest way to find 3 way link exchanges.

Google can also pick up paid links, links at the footer of the page or that are placed in a special box can be found and either ignored or given very little of the link power (passed to the website the link is pointing to) the age of the link is also an important aspect of links that are placed on high ranking, high PR websites, links placed for a month or less probably wont get any PR value or an improve in their SERP’s for that matter, this seems to be another way for picking up paid links.

Alright, so what can I do about it?

Best choice is to build a website/webpage that makes people want to link to it, that’s absolutely the best way to get high quality links from other websites, writing what we call a linkbait is usually a good way to get links, a linkbait is usually an article, topic, post or a page that is written with the intention of creating a good impression for the reader that makes him want to link to it, or use it in his website and provide a link back to where he copied it from.

Ok, but I also want to buy text links to boost my rankings.

In this case, you should take note of the following notes when buying links on websites:

• Make sure that the page your buying a link on is cached on Google

• Preferably has a good PR

• The page shouldn’t have more than 20 out going links (the less the better)

• Link shouldn’t have the nofollow tag added to it (check the html source, more about nofollow later on)

• Link shouldn’t be rotated using a script, it should be a direct link to your website

• Make sure you use your main keywords in the anchor text, more tips about this later on.

• It would be great if you can put the look where it would look natural to have it there, not besides other outgoing links, for example I was looking at websites to place links on for pagerankincrease.com instead of placing it with the other links under recommended websites, I asked the webmaster to place it in a new section called “Do you want to increase your page rank?” followed by little text about the service and link to the website using my main keywords, of course this usually costs more than your standard text link,  but you would get way more click through rates, especially if its strategically placed inside the websites content.

• Placing links on websites related to your industry will provide you with a better bang for your buck.

Those are the main points you should take note of when buying links on websites, researching which websites are best suited for you to buy links on is another large topic that I am planning to post about soon. Generally speaking you should look for related websites, don’t look at their PR only, if its a good website that you would want to bookmark then its probably a good idea to place a link there, if its a website you find no value in even if with a high PR then its probably not a good idea to waste money on a link on that site.

I can’t stress enough on not using any website that offers “Thousands of link on related websites” you never know what kind of strategies those services use, what kind of websites they use, and more importantly how would Google look at a website that gained 1000′s of links in a matter of weeks, banned? probably!

That’s about it for now, link building strategies is a huge topic, with rules changing all of the time with the advancements of algorithms and the new ways spammers find to increase their link popularity (and the new rules search engines implement to catch them, its a never ending story!) I’ll do my best to cover these issues and the latest buzz about the nofollow tag in my next post. For now, I am outta here!