Backlinks.Which are most effective?

Hi Alexa,

Great post! You are one of the sharpest minds on this board.

I would quibble just a little with your characterization of Backlinks. While I do know what you meant, it can be a bit confusing for someone new to the concepts of SEO to call the act of building backlinks a part of SEO. Technically speaking, building backlinks is purely promotional activity and the act of building backlinks will not necessarily optimize one's pages for a targeted keyword.

SEO is the process of creating or modifying content in a fashion that helps search engines understand the relevance your page has to a particular keyword. When we optimize pages for search engines we focus on key elements taking care to include our targeted keyword within those elements.

When we build backlinks we are promoting traffic to our pages by creating a link on another page that will lead users (and bots) to our targeted page. Those backlinks may or may not be optimized for SEO benefit. In a proper SEO campaign we use the SEO process as described above on the anchortext element (and words near that element) because search engines, Google in particular, use that as one of the signals of relevance for the targeted page.

Google combines the relevancy score of on-page elements with the off-page relevancy scores to arrive at the final relevancy scored used for ranking. When it comes to highly competitive keywords, the importance of backlinks become paramount because it is the higher off-page score that allows your page to outrank others with near equal on-page scores.


Amen to that!

Thanks Alexa. But then, in your opinion, whats the most effective backlink?

Backlinks are the most important thing when it comes to ranking your page anywhere near the top - unfortunately, good content only comes after that, but that's not the point here.

The best backlinks you can ever have, will come from a relevant page, that is considered an authority on the subject by google.

And I don't mean PR. PR is just one metric out of hundreds that G use. People pay too much attention to it, even G itself have said over and over that it is not that important, and even removed it from their webmaster tools.

I mean the page is ranking in a high position for a related keyword. Then it is considered (obviously) by G as an authority, subsequently, if this page links to your page, the link will carry serious weight.

Links from related pages, created by yourself, like web 2.0 properties are good, but they take time to acquire authority, because when you build them, they don't have any significance in the eyes of G. So patience there.

The same goes with article directory links. When and if your article ranks, it will have some authority, and the link from it will have a weight too. Never spend money or time building backlinks to an article though. Not worth it.

Then there are blog comment backlinks. Don't pay TOO much attention to the whole dofollow/nofollow stuff. Make sure to make quality comments on active relevant blogs (of course, it is desirable that your content on your site is up to par). That, besides the backlink, will get you noticed and you can talk with the blog owner about doing a guest article - which is sweet, because then you'll get to link to your page from a relevant source.

Then there are bottom of the barrel links, that are hardly worth it, however, they can influence your rankings positively, so I usually find someone on fiverr to do them - xrumer/scrapebox blasts, social bookmarks, and so on.

You must always shoot for the best backlinks you can get, that's my point.

And Alexa Smiths post is brilliant.