Some thoughts/ideas about link building

Hi George and Dee,

Dee, I have to disagree with the conclusion drawn from Terry's excellent thread. While I think that most Warriors on this forum are in agreement that backlinks are an important and effective tool for promoting our websites, there is a great deal of confusion about how backlinks actually help us rank for our targeted keywords.

Much of this confusion seems to arise from the misunderstanding of a fundamental concept. Perhaps the most basic and import concept to understanding how search engines work is what I refer to as the 1st rule of SEO: Search engine ranks web pages, not websites. If you do not internalize and apply this simply basic fact, then you are likely to be confused about many issues related to SEO.

Another fundamental concept is that search engines, particularly Google are focused primarily on relevance. They are not trying to rank web pages based on quality, backlinks or PR.

Where people make claims about this topic that border on deceptive is the constant referencing of website topics. I realize some people actually believe that search engine look at website topics, but they don't, it just seems that way sometimes.

Even if you don't yet believe me, let's just assume for this discussion that search engines don't ever consider website topics. What is it then, that they do consider relevant? Let me invoke the 1st rule of SEO: Search engines rank web pages, not websites. So it is the web page's relevance that matters.

If we dig deeper into the workings of a large search engine like Google, we will discover some of the principles that they follow to determine relative relevance. Two of those principles are "Prominence" and "Proximity".

When you consider how prominence and proximity is applied to backlink relevance, logic dictates that anchortext is the most "prominent" element and has the closest "proximity" to your page and is therefore the strongest signal for measuring backlink relevance. I think most of us can agree that anchortext is the single most important element of effective backlinks.

So where does the confusion arise? When someone says that website topics are not important it is true, however when someone says relevance doesn't matter, this is flat out wrong. The relevance of a backlink is of paramount importance. The confusion often, IMO, arises from the incorrect assumption that search engines are even aware of your website topic. They aren't aware because they realize that your website's topic does not need to be known for them to return superior search results.

What made search engines like Google so successful was the understanding that websites can be about many different topics and the most useful pages could be found in unexpected places. This single concept is what led to the shift from "surfing" to "searching" as the primary portal model. Back in the 90's "surfing the web" was the primary activity next to email. These days you hardly hear anyone use the phrase anymore, instead we search the web or "google it".

The primary difference between a "Search Engine" and a "Directory" is that search engines index individual pages while directories generally index websites. The founders of Google realized that it is a far superior model to find the most relevant page rather than send someone to the home page of website and leave them to try to find what they are looking for buried somewhere in that site.

When a search engine looks at a page for signals of relevance they consider the pages that link to it as well as pages the are link to. These all contribute to your pages overall relevancy score. If your page is brand new then it will have few links and they will be primarily from your own website. This is where your website could have influence on your page, but as your backlinks grow you will likely have more influence coming from backlinks from external websites and your own website topic will be inconsequential.

Search engines look at the web that your page is part of, that web is made up of the pages that you link to and the pages that link to yours. That web can have a substantial influence on your own page's relevancy score. This is why you must have a significant amount of relevant backlinks for highly competitive keywords. But, make no mistake, irrelevant backlinks do not improve your relevancy score, and website topics have little to do with SEO.