Linkbuilding is one of the vital building blocks of your entire company’s SEO. It is also one of the most tedious and risky tasks involved in SEO. There are certain linkbuilding mindsets that hinder us SEO practitioners and here are six of ‘em.
“Only high PR pages are worth it”
All websites starts from PR 0 – and that’s a fact. The PR 7 or PR 10 sites that you see now, all started from scratch. It’s so difficult to get a good link from high PR sites and we tend to neglect sites that have little no no PageRank. Now I’m not suggesting that you should get backlinks from low PR sites that are owned by newbie webmasters. You have to know where to draw the line between ‘new and up-coming’ and ‘new and boring’.
If you think that the website doesn’t have potential and the webmaster isn’t doing too well on his work, then don’t invest on getting a backlink from there. But if you see potential and the webmaster seems to know what he/she is doing, then go for it! Sooner or later it will mature and your relationship with that website will pay off in great linkjuice.
“Anchor text? What’s that?”
What people see as a link in your website is directly described by the anchor text. Anchor text is arguably one of the most vital attributes a link has. It give the search engines an idea on what the website that the link is pointing to is about.
People who don’t care about their anchor text and lazily place a ‘click here’ instead of a well thought-of description is not making the most out of the link’s value. If you are going to interlink webpages in your site, make sure that the anchor text is well thought-of and relevant.
“Wherever, whenever”
Where you put the link is important. Links in footers don’t get much attention – both from humans and from search engines. Why? Well perhaps because the reason why it was placed there is because it lacks something to be placed on a better location. Perhaps it lacks relevance, or content, or what have you.
Search engines try to imitate human reaction and behavior. Naturally, us humans (as readers) would click on links inside the article or perhaps on the sidebar. What are the chances of us looking at and clicking links in the footer?
The location of your links matter.
“One of the crowd”
Being just one of the hundred guys for a girl that you love sucks, right? Being just a link in a website with thousands of outgoing links sucks too! A webpage passess on linkjuice to sites that it links out to. If you’re just one of many outgoing links, it is common sense to think that the linkjuice being passed on to you has been diminished by a hundred-fold.
Do not go for a website with whom you will share more than a handful of outgoing links with. It’s a waste of time.
“Help me Facebook!”
Links from social networking sites will definitely not help in boosting your PageRank. One reason is that it has so many other outgoing links too in the first place. Another reason is that most, if not all social network links are nofollow. Also, those links have the tendency to disappear after a few months.
Sorry buddy but Facebook won’t help in your linkbuilding campaign. The most it can do is to get your content go viral
“All my eggs in one big basket”
Lots of SEO practitioners create backlinks only to their website’s home page. This isn’t wrong but if you don’t practice deep-linking, you’re missing out in ranking some of your good articles for what they’re worth. Pushing your main page up the ranks ain’t bad – but don’t neglect the other content in your site which make up the juice.
About Sean
this article is even more true and relevant today.
The page rank fallacy frustrates me the most. Some link builders look at this metric and this metric alone…
Haha there’s so much more to links than Pagerank. But yeah I get what you mean Michael. Good thing you know your stuff.
You are absolutely right buddy .. webmasters are really conscious about building backlinks for their home page for ranking, which is quite obvious that they want their page to visible in search results.. But despite of that, i believe – it doesn’t matter from which page your traffic is coming from in search results, it either be your home page or inner page. So i think.. why should webmasters focus on making backlinks for home page while they can easily grab more traffic from inner page ..
Amazing work keep it up.
Excellent Article, I do agree with you that “Pushing your main page up the ranks ain’t bad – but don’t neglect the other content in your site which make up the juice”
To be honest, I was doing same you post , I will do deep linking as well :)
still in love with your style! you blog was on of the first looked at nearly 2 years ago -
I love the fact that you stated that Facebook or even Twitter links WILL NOT help push you up in rankings. So many “experts” believe otherwise yet it is so obvious that its almost useless unless your doing Social Media Marketing… They are “NOFOLLOW” for crying out loud!
Sorry was just venting there for a moment. I had a competitor cause me much trouble with a former client when he convinced the client that they MUST have Facebook & Twitter links to rise in SERP’s.
Lol
I know how you feel Gerard. Vent it all out.
I am Really Impressed with your Articles,Keep It up :)