Why Building Links Is Important….
This may be spot on right….then again it may be completely wrong. But I am going to let you (the reader) determine the value of it. It is no secret that link building is important. And there is no doubt that anchor text can make a difference when it comes to ranking well.
But have you ever wondered why?
Most marketers and blogger like to deduce it down to its simplest elements.
- They say that a link is a vote.
- The more links you have, the better you rank.
- They also say that some backlinks are worth more than others.
- Finally, getting a link from a high pagerank website is more valuable that getting one from one with a low page rank.
But is it really that simple?
Just the other day, I read a forum post in which someone felt frustrated because they couldn’t manage to get a page indexed. This was despite running through the gamut of bookmarking and other traditional forms of indexing strategies. I started thinking about this from a common sense perspective (rather than the usual frames of thought that most of us go through…a link is a link, ect…) and you tell me if this makes sense.
The reason why backlinks are important is because it gives the search engines more opportunities to continually find our page(s). A backlink isn’t just counted once and then the search engines stop following it. Every time the search engines re-discover the page with the link on it, they follow it again (and again and again).
Now imagine that you have a website with 100 links pointing to it. That is 100 chances that the search engines could follow the link to your website (again). If you have a website with 100,000 backlinks, then that is 100,000 times the SE could find your page, which means that the search engines could be staying on your website a lot.
I say could because there are other variables at play here….
For instance, let’s say that out of your 100,000 backlinks, the majority ( we will say 90,000) come from a forum profile that incidentally doesn’t have any links pointing to them other than the internal links of the forum itself. The forum could be visited constantly by the search engines but your “links” could be buried very deeply in the forum’s infrastructure….
The result? The search engines don’t visit the profile very often because although the forum is constantly adding new content (which gets indexed), the profile goes deeper and deeper into the background of the site.
Because the search engines aren’t finding the links often, they don’t follow them often either.
So, now you have the remainder 10,000 links to “remind” google of your importance in the overall scheme of things. That’s not bad….but it would be better if ALL of the 100,000 links were re-discovered daily or weekly.
So, what would be an effective strategy to help remind google that your link exists?
Before you answer that, let’s go into another issue that effects your link building….
Google and “Indexed” pages
You can also add links to websites all day long and if they don’t get indexed (for whatever reason), they won’t get counted. The biggest reason why this happens is because you have dropped a link on a dead website that isn’t updated very often & has few links pointing to it. If the link is dropped way back in the archives of the website, then the chances of google finding it are less as well.
By the way, if you are following this, then you would have to agree that it makes the how many links a day question a moot point. Just because you are creating 10 links a day doesn’t imply that the links will immediately get discovered OR that they will count at all…..
Helping Google find YOU should be your #1 priority. One of the best ways to see if Google is loving the website you are dropping a link on is to check to see how many pages are indexed and the cache date. If the site has the majority of pages indexed AND is visiting the site at least weekly (view the cache), then you have a very good chance of having your website indexed.
The deeper you go into a website, the harder it will be for the search engines to find it
Just because a page is indexed doesn’t necessarily imply that google will re-discover it. It is the reason why an ezine article will rank for awhile and then start to drop down in rankings.
As the article falls further and further down the rabbit hole of what we know as EZA (or any site), the less of a chance it has to for Google to “find” it. If there aren’t any external links pointing to it, all the search engines have is the internal links, which means that in the case of EZA, unless you are on the most viewed or most published listings, the internal links won’t last long.
Same thing goes with literally any site. Let’s say that the NYtimes links to you on their front page. For a brief second, your link gets it’s moment in the sun, your rankings go up and life is good. Then, as the link get buried deeper and deeper, it becomes less visited and less important. The only thing that could revive it is more links to that page OR more internal links from the NYT website itself.
Using a more typical example, let’s say that you have guest posted on a PR4 website. You get a temporary boost until it falls off the front page and as it moves deeper and deeper in the archives, your link becomes less and less relevant (unless you link to it OR the website re-introduces it into the system).
From a practical, common sense perspective, that makes sense, right?
Some websites will remedy this by reintroducing old content via an anchor text.
So, let’s say that you have 100 pages of content. Your front page is visited by Google daily, largely in part because of the hundreds of links you have pointed to it. The problem is that your front page is your most recent content. It gets indexed, google follows a few of your links (like your categories) and then stops after it has followed 50 links on your site.
What happens to the other 50 pages?
Do you think they will become less important? Old news (since there are no new links pointing to them?)
A remedy to this is to reintroduce your page. Since the search engines visit once a day, they will follow your link, re-discover your page and count the link. Suddenly your dead page that hasn’t been visited for some time, is more important than it was yesterday because you gave the search engines the chance to re-discover the already indexed link.
Of course, the better option is to simply do what the mega-sites do-
- Create Silos for your website (think categories)…..
- Create a static front page for your website….
- List the Silo links on your front page
- On each of the “silos” create a page that links to all of your content within the silo.
That’s how hubpages, Associated Content, Ezine Articles, Ehow, WiseGeek and the other mega sites do things. If your site is smaller or more genre focused, don’t create a silo at all….simply make your homepage a portal for ALL of your content.
Why Internal Links are Important
There aren’t many who give internal linking a special place in terms of importance. And personally I don’t understand why. When you look at mega-sites, the first thing that comes glaring at you is the fact that all have a very strong internal link profile.
And why do you think that is?
Every page you create that gets indexed has a value. The more pages you create (that get indexed), the more valuable your site becomes. This is ALL pages….tag pages, category pages, ect…. If you are constantly linked up with your other pages, guess what happens?
Your page gets visited and google follows all those links that are pointing to all of your pages and they get “reintroduced” to the system.
The Deindexing Issue
So, this can also work in reverse as well. Let’s say that you start playing around with the system, linking to bad neighborhoods, cloak or whatever and google starts to deindex your website. They don’t outright ban you but the pages that once have value don’t anymore.
What happens then?
If your site was ranking primarily on a strong internal link structure, then your website on the whole loses value which in turns means the pages that were ranking because of it drop down the rankings as well.
Anyone remember the “squidoo slap?” I do. Basically, what happened was Google decided that Squidoo was not churning out “quality” content and punished the website (and the marketers who created content for them) by deranking pages. Of course, many marketers howled and complained and a lot of people wrote off Squidoo as yet another victim of Google.
But did Google really “slap” Squidoo? Many lens still ranked during this time despite this. So what happened?
Once again, this is my theory and if you disagree with it, by all means comment. What I think that Google really did was deindex a large portion of the website. Because Squidoo is alot like most mega-sites, a lot of it “power” came from internal linking within the website.
So using this logic, if Squidoo has 100,000 pages indexed and then overnight Google wipes away half of that, what is that going to do to your link structure? Can you say complete massacre?
If google decided to deindex a quarter of the hubpages out there, there would be a similar effect.
Some sites are more important than others when it comes to building links…
I think that it shouldn’t surprise you that getting a link from NYtimes is more important than getting a link from EZA and getting a link from EZA would be more important than dropping a link on a forum profile.
But have you ever thought why?
Most bloggers and marketers will write it off as simply they are an authority site. And they are but it isn’t necessarily because the search engines have deemed them an authority site…..
Going back to my theory bag again here, I think that the reason has to do with audience and the power of social validation (I discussed this in last week’s newsletter). The NYTimes not only holds sway with the search engines but also is considered important by thousands of people. People come to the site, read the article, LINK TO THE ARTICLE which drives more TRAFFIC to the article and in turn more links to the article. This creates a potential waterfall of links and conversations about the article. The more people who read it and say it is good, must mean that it is, right? (hence, the social validation)
More links pointing to the article from hundreds of places means more opportunities that the search engines get to revisit the article which means more opportunities that the search engines get to re-visit your page which is linked up.
Consequently, because of the way the NYTimes website is set up, the article link will be dynamically broadcast across other pages with relevant content which gives the search engines even more chances to re-visit the page and follow your link.
To a lesser degree, this could happen to EZA as well.
- You write an article.
- Article appears on the front page…
- Article also appears within the category page…
- Article also appears (briefly) on every article within its category…
- Article gets “popular” and suddenly it appears again in the “most viewed section” within its category….
- Article starts to get published and suddenly it appears again on the “most published section” within its category.
Forget the authority theory for a second. There is less value in a forum profile that may or may not get indexed because the linking opportunities fall directly on your head. It can be done, mind you. I run across profile pages that have 1,000′s of links pointing to it but then again that is strictly blackhat in nature.
Lots of Links or Lots of Pages
Grizzly claims that a site can be an authority site without a ton of content. It can (and he has proven that). But a site can also be an authority site without a lot of links…they just need to have a lot of indexed pages that are linked well internally a la wikipedia or any other mega site that is out there.
And the reason is simple:
A lot of links means that your site is constantly getting revisited because of the volume of links out there.
If your site has 5,000 links pointing to it and those 5,000 links are each visited once a week, then your importance will swell. But if another site has 10,000 links and those links are visited once a week….well, you get the picture.
Alternatively, what would be better?
- A website with 5,000 links that are visited weekly
- A website with 2,500 links and are visited daily (because of the link popularity of the links pointing to your link)
I don’t know the answer to that by the way….just musing a little…..
A lot of content can be just as effective because each indexed page is worth something in the grand scheme of things (which increases the overall value of your site) and your mission in this case would be to have google re-visit as many pages as possible when it is visiting your site. And don’t think for a second that Google doesn’t like large sites (google exists because of content creation…they are nothing more than a giant aggregator)
So YOU tell me…am I very far off base with this assessment of how important building links is?
(Previous Article on Getting Backlinks- Link Building and the Barrier to Entry Factor)
21 Responses to “Why Building Links Is Important….”
Comments
Read below or add a comment...
Great analysis! That helps explain ‘authority’ as part of the algorithm and not a subjective rank, and also the reasoning behind why to use internal links.
Thanks.
Hi Leo,
If I understand you correctly, your idea is that links may not be weighted votes (where a link from a high authority page represents a stronger vote) but represent the probability of google finding your site/page for a certain keyword (so authority represents the increased chance of being found by google). So, instead of just building links to our own websites, we should spend part of our time building links to existing pages which link to us. In other words, if we increase the probability of google finding the page linking to us, we also increase the probability of google finding our page.
On the practical level, I can think of one way to test this:
1) Build two near-identical websites, A and B.
2) Build 5 links to A – A1 to A5. Build 5 links to B.
3) Build 5 links to A1, …, build 5 links to A5. Build 25 links to B.
4) Repeat ad infinitum so that A’s link structure is a pyramid of ever increasing height, while B’s link structure becomes a wider and wider net.
5) Check the results – does A rank better, or does B rank better? If A ranks better, there is a strong implication that the probability model is correct. Otherwise, the opposite (i.e. the vote model) is correct.
Is my understanding even correct? Is my proposed experiment valid? Have you ever tested this yourself? Unfortunately, I’m too busy with my current activities to try it out myself.
OTOH, I do have some niche sites that are in the doldrums. If I build new links to my existing links, i.e. build up the link structure for A, and my site revitalizes itself, that would be quite suggestive, don’t you think?
Really interesting article Leo and not something I’ve thought about before so I really liked this point of view.
I guess the only way to know for sure how links affect rankings is to do Calvin’s suggestion and all things being equal (but when are things ever that equal really?) it should show one way or another whether it’s number of links or number of times your site gets found that moves you in the SE’s.
On a related note HubPages has just improved it’s internal linking structure where it suggests internal links from other hubs to place in your hubs (and you get a HubKarma score to obsess over too) – so it will be interesting to see how this affects hub rankings over the next few weeks in the serps.
@ Calvin,
Actually what I’m saying is that while everyone says “link to authority sites” or “get a lot of links” with no explanation or rhyme to reason other than it improves rankings, I have been entertaining why does it improve rankings. Just a musing..that’s all.
@ John,
Yeah, you can’t be subjective with link building. It is all math. And the funny thing is that a good majority of bloggers have this image of 1,000′s of google employees looking at website data to determine ranking. In actuality, most of it is “automated”.
@ Tracey,
Thanks. I noticed that about hubpages as well. I have been interlinking hubs for months now. I use a system I created that works really well in terms of ranking sites. I may get into that at a later date.
Leo, a few questions please.
1. Any comment about deep link pro?
2. How much weight do you put on semantics and ontologies for content? (a fascinating subject, just started reading about this stuff).
3. Commenting? Even though the link juice is minimal and could be nofollow, could the increase in traffic be enough for Google to up the rank of ones site just because of the traffic?
It just makes sense that when everyone is piling on to the common methods of link building, then Google devalues them. What were left with is trying to find out what and where Google places value. Hubs still seems to have Googles trust and EZA to some degree does also.
Your point about links being pushed to the back of the line is valid. Seems then that backlinking is a continuous process to stay ranked.
@ Ric
People don’t put much stock into directories. I do. They are considered “safe” by google and can help a virtually unknown NEW site with ranking out of the box. Of course, there are some criteria to consider that goes beyond pagerank- Is the site cached regularly? Does it provide deep links? Is it active? ect…ect….
Deep link pro is nothing more than an automated system to “applying” for link inclusion in these directories. What separates it from other directory auto submission software is that Josh has found some directories that allow deep links (links that aren’t your home page). Josh knows what he is doing and I have yet to find one product from Josh that I was dissatisfied with.
Of course, the bigger question is what your plans are and does deep link pro fit into your plans in a way that could improve your business. And that is something only you know….
When it comes to semantics, I am really torn. While it makes sense, I have to wonder how “SMART” google’s algo really is in relation to semantics. For instance, it still can’t tell the difference between plural and singular even though if I was talking about “cars”, “car” should be almost as relevant, right? Obviously, if you are sticking to one market, your content would speak to your market and the language would come natural, ya know?
There are some marketers that rank organically solely from comment marketing. This goes for do-follow blogs as well as no-follow blogs. However, the downside is that they have to continue commenting to maintain their ranking. I think that this falls in line with my theory though (as you fall off the front page and further into the archives, the page is discovered less and less…)
I don’t necessarily think that google devalues links. I think that what makes parasitic hosts like EZA and Hubpages so powerful is the sheer amount of content that is produced daily AND the fact that the internal link structure is so focused (making following relevant links so easy for the search engines). Then again, that is my opinion on the matter and may be completely wrong.
Not really. Once you are ranking well, the links come naturally because more people are exposed to your content. The theory behind all this is that the reason why folks rank is because their pages are constantly indexed because of the volume of links that they have attained and the links of those linking to you get. Once again, this is the “new” frame of mind and may change.
Leo, thanks for the interesting read. Regarding the internal linking structure, no doubt it is important. Even part of the algorithm Google uses when determining sitelinks (for authority sites) is based on proper internal linking. Now, you mentioned interlinking hubs on hubpages. I have always been wondering which is the best strategy. For example, is it better to link each new hub to the previous existing hubs, or to use the already indexed hubs for pushing up new hubs? Clearly, reciprocal linking is not the best solution, or maybe I am wrong? Looking forward to your future article(s) regarding internal linking, creating silos, etc.
@ EB
I try not to overthink linking when it comes to internal links to be real honest. The rule I follow is that if it makes sense to link, I link. If it doesn’t, I don’t. I tend to not play around with reciprocal linking.
Spot on, Leo.
I have found that Hubpages inter-linking (as well as Squidoo) not only produces traffic but is enough to completely support rankings in less competitive niches. There are several where I only needed 2 hubs (interlinked and related) and 2 lens (interlinked and related) to get the site ranked on page 1 (top 5 slot in some cases) for my chosen keywords without any other links. This also the power of WordPress MU, and not enough marketers realize just how strong MU sites are.
@ Marcus – interesting take on MU…are you suggesting a single user employment of MU where you link between faux “users” or…?
@ Leo:
Flipped my lid. Very thoughtfully produced take on linking strategies, I’m just diggin’ your gray matter. Thanks. <==still chewing on it
@JamestheJust – You can find open MU networks via Google and create sites on them, or do as you mention, create your own and deploy multiple blogs each with their own author. The existing ones usually already have juice, so they usually work the best.
For those wondering how to find MU networks, it is just as simple as using a search operator…
@ Marcus
I have to agree with you about interlinking. People don’t understand it and are very shortsighted. If you enter a market and create 50 hubpages on the market, you are basically controlling the conversation within the HP community. And since hubpages randomly interlinks within the niche to other hubpages, since you are controlling the market, you are also benefiting the most from the juice. It is a complete no-brainer in my opinion….
Leo,
I would like to thank you for providing a blog that provides informative and useful information. Its very refreshing to read a blog that challenges the normal way of thinking about SEO. Also nice to read someone that practices the principles they preach.
Quick question:
I know you focus on quality sites that have high quality content with strong external/internal linking structures. Just curious to know if the recent google “Mayday” update has had a positive or negative effect on your overall rankings/traffic. I personally have been hit extremely hard on some of my sites. The obvious reasoning behind this is because most of those sites were fairly thin with poor internal linking structures. Strange how some sites were hit while others weren’t. Interested to hear your take on the new updates.
I look forward to your future posts
Great post Leo. I also judge in part the health of a link opportunity via the Google cache date, and the number of indexed pages. Its a great way to quickly analyze the overall well-being of any website in the eyes of Google.
Isn’t funny how people get so put off about certain kinds of link opportunities? I have read countless times about how forum links, comment links, directory links, sidebar links, footer links, etc. etc. are “devalued” by Google in some way, and that you shouldn’t waste your time with these sorts of links. Yet people are obviously still ranking with the help of these links. It makes me almost want to agree with your theory that Google doesn’t ever devalue links at all.
In my opinion this could be correct, as I don’t really have any solid evidence that supports how a link could be strengthened, or weakened by its position on the page, or via the “type” of site it comes from. I bet Google engineers laugh at all the nonsense people speculate about in regard to their algorithm, and I highly doubt that they even care about stupid things like too many sidebar links, too many directory links, etc. etc.
The evidence speaks for itself. If you can get a link with the appropriate anchor text on a page that stays indexed, your rankings should improve, bottom-line. I’m wondering what your thoughts are about nofollow. I personally don’t like getting links with it, although I can almost guarantee that Google utilizes that data to some degree, as they have officially stated that they “do-follow/ crawl” those links.
@ Joe,
What’s Mayday?…..
Just kidding…to answer your question, no, they weren’t hit and I didn’t expect them to be hit.
@ Roland,
I personally don’t worry too much about no follow/do follow criteria too much, especially if it is in a social setting like a blog. But you are right. A link from a no-follow website like wikipedia certainly helps with ranking…and once again, if that from the fact that wikipedia is so well connected, link wise that they are constantly indexed or is it the result of the authority that wikipedia has?…..just musing here.
Sometime (read: ever time!) I’m just too lazy to do the internal linking.
I use “similar posts” and “random posts” plugins/widget for wordpress.
It will create additional links to the old posts.
If you have more then 100 posts it will help you a lot (for internal link and bot revisiting purposes)
Don’t forget the categories and tags
Forgot to ask, how about sitemap, Leo?
Wow man, this really is magnificent. I just can’t even figure out how you ended up in so many comparisons and theories. And interestingly, all are proven to be TRUE. That’s all I wanted.
Anyway 10 years of research worth something, na? And that’s what is getting refleectd in your information.
Thanks for yet another informative post.
Feels like am going to read the entire website content one by one