Links are everywhere in every
Every day I get queries from muddled webmasters trying to get the ranking capability for their websites online. They tell me the story how they’ve built all sort of links from diversified sources, but their websites still can’t be ranked in search engines, Google, specifically.
Understand this:
- They’ve stunned that those rich anchor text links they placed on web 2.0 blogs they got registered for free don’t help their search engine rankings. However, it’s not as if they have gotten the bunch of Nofollow links.
- Additionally, they also did some manipulative link building and placed HTML links to various pages of their websites on a bunch of Blogspot, Weebly or WordPress blogs (they’ve registered themselves).
- They’re still putting out media releases announcing specific products or services they offer, and they pay extra dollars for the functionality to add as many keyword tags as possible with-in PR posts.
- Some of them also offer dofollow links that get syndicated by all kind of sister publications.
So what’s wrong here? Why can’t they seem to get ahead in Google?
The answer is pretty naive. They’re using old-school pre-Panda/Penguin linking techniques that may have worked at one point (albeit probably not for the long haul), but which are highly unlikely to be given even a passing glance from Google nowadays.
Any link you can place by yourself is not a link as far as Google is concerned. Certainly not in the PageRank passing sense. Sure, they will crawl those links, and they will most likely even show them as links to your site in your Google Search Console account. But they also show links that have the nofollow attribute on them, and according to Google, those don’t pass PageRank.
Google certainly wouldn’t want your own strategically placed links to count as real (PageRank-passing) links to your site because they aren’t. Just as Google doesn’t consider paid links to be the type they want to provide you with link juice, links that you place yourself don’t fall in line with the whole “links as a vote” ideal that helped Google become the leading search engine in the universe.
Overlook “OLD SEO Link Building Formula”
Relive that out of the two hundred factors and signals that Google looks at to determine the relevancy of any page in their index, it all boils down to two major components:
- What you have to say about yourself – The first point mentioned above looks at your site and the content placed on it. It covers your above-the-fold content, headings, CTA use, interlinking, blog posts, and sidebar widgets. All of this is in your control, completely. You can write and place whatever you want, and it will help Google Bots to decide what type of keywords your website should be found for.
- What others think and say about you – But it’s the second one — what others say about you — that is important for our purposes today. The very idea of using links as a signal came about as a way to learn what other people were saying about websites and businesses. Backlinks were the key way to judge this. Theoretically, if lots of people or websites were linking to particular pages of a website, they were saying, “Hey everyone, here’s a great site/service/product/article. I totally recommend it.”
Google (and everyone else) already know that you recommend your own site. Of course, you do. It’s your baby that you’ve nurtured since birth. They know you love it and think it’s the best site in the world and that it should be showing up in the number one spot for anything even remotely related to it. (You also think your kids are the best-behaved little geniuses in the world, but that doesn’t make it true!)
But when it comes to links, Google doesn’t care about what you think. Your online authority and credibility may not be trusted.
Search Bots want to know what others think.
So if you are seriously trying to climb up your search rankings in Google, and you’ve started working on it, reconsider your chances of putting links unstrategically. They really don’t care. Link velocity, referring IPs, geographic areas, anchor texts, linked pages, and trust score – they look at each link in a wide context algorithmically. At best, they’ll ignore them. At worst, they will push down your website with an unnatural links penalty.
Instead, consume your time and resources first producing something worth linking.
Coming Up With Linkable Content
Editorial links are the today’s win. That’s what Google wants you to have in your index. To get these links naturally and periodically, ultimately you should have a depth of content answering a range of common questions being asked in your industry. Genie Recycling uniformly creates imposing guides on money saving theme.
If you are creating another mediocre piece, SORRY…, the web is already overfilled with bumbling content. It wouldn’t do any magic and will probably fail to win any traction. No Likes. No Shares. No Links.
People prefer to link to other resources for one of the following reasons:
- To provide additional related information to their readers.
- To bring credibility to their own pages by citing popular resources.
- To reference data provided in the post.
- To leverage
SEO value by linking out to other industry related authority domains.
You can put evergreen content in any tone of your preference: informative, motivative, or entertaining. Everlasting one that’s so comprehensive, engaging, and credible so that other people like to link to it!
Infographics, GIFs, studies or researches, definite tutorials, and interactive quizzes have produced great results for brands. CPA Exam Guy Blog is such one focusing on helping out students.
Final Words
Once you have produced that (and that’s really the hard contribution you do in search marketing), you need to let others know it exists. In other words, market the heck out of it to your target audience!
A young marketing expert with the team at a business meeting– stock image
