Stop Wasting Time and Money When Backlinking

Recently theres been some posts about backlinks not working for new sites and sites going down in ranking rather than up (And for a longer time than the Google dance would explain) when they have applied links.

Still other posts have indicated that backlinks are working fine and dandy. Why could that be? What makes the difference? First lets admit the obvious. No one has the secret ingredients search engines use - not all the ingredients at least. In many cases the site should be fine and will return but it also may be because of backlinks that will end up wasting your time and money.

The popular misconception is that all High PR backlinks are the same. they are not. Another popular misconception is that all that matters is quantity. Also false. So what are some of the things that can waste your time and money when backlinking? Not getting REAL quality backlinks. thats right there are several kinds of low quality backlinks even when the PR is high. I'll list four scenarios where this is true -

The first one is kind of obvious to me.

1) Using nofollow backlinks that you bought in a package, are free, or you found yourself. Several people are inflating the number of backlinks in their package by including nofollow backlinks. Some are claiming in the tens of thousands of backlinks by doing this and the person who knows nothing about SEO are buying into the power of numbers.

There is all kinds of debates on this but I am going with Google. They own and run the world's most popular search engine and they have said along with a number of top search engine experts that the the nofollow attribute on a page means what it says- Google will not pass on PR or count the link. Its ignored. Anyone want to claim otherwise has the burden of proof to show otherwise. IF you don't want to rank for Google thats fine but most of us do.

2) Diluted links. This is the practice of either sharing your links or getting links that are shared by too many people. Some people even think they are doing a good thing when they share links in an open forum. What people don't seem to understand is that NO site or page on the internet has unlimited power to help in search rankings. In other words a page with 200 links on it on a PR 4 page is worth less than 3 links on a page rank 1. WORSE? Google has algorithms to detect link farming - sites with just too many links. Dofollow blogs that exist for no other purpose than allowing anyone to drop their links have next to no value. Too many cooks spoil the broth and that doesn't even begin to tak about the chance of the links eventually being all removed.

3) Non diverse link. I shudder a bit at this one because I know I am stepping on some feet here and it doesn't make sense to make enemies. Too many people build their backlink list for themselves or get them from others that use the simplest method in the world to find backlinks and because of that they offer backlinks all from one source.

All vBulletin forum signatures
All Phbb sites
All Ning or kickapps.

This allows anyone to build a quick list of hundreds of backlink sites but for the same reason any programmer will tell you its pretty easy for Google to identify the same footprints of those software packages and limit their effect. It may or may not be true that now Google doesn't look at this but for a company that is fighting web spam they will eventually. Why roll the dice? Its natural to have hundreds of links to your site per week but its not natural to have all the hundreds of backlinks from forum signatures. Any fool would know that that is almost always a product of a webmaster creating links to his own site and speaking as a programmer it is the simplest thing in the world to program a detection sub program to identify. the answer is simple. Mix it up

4) Anchor text Diversity - This will be controversial and I'll get some heat from it but I always diversify my anchor text a little. Again maybe its the programmer in me but I've seen good evidence that Google likes to see variation in anchor text. No natural linking pattern includes just one anchor text over and over. People link in a variety of ways. One way the whole time is a dead give away of web spam.

Some of these you might scoff at but remember the time and money you are spending now you expect to help keep your site ranked high for years to come. Theres no sense in wasting either time or money or you just might come here in a few months and be one of those writing

"My site fell to page 200 - why?"