Common Backlinking Myths

Hey Fellow Warriors,

Recently I have been finding a lot of conflicting information where people are for or against certain backlinking methods. Lots of these methods are being debunked by a few of the forums more knowledgable members (I personally think).

Now personally I am not a SEO guy, I do not rank sites, but I am a product creator and I do write a very large amount about all aspects of backlinking and SEO. Over that time I have come across lots of myths and legends so I figured I would get them up and see if anyone else has more myths to add to the group

Now by all means, these are strictly "as far as I know", but hopefully these and those submitted by others will help dispell some misinformation!



1. Duplicate content is not bad for backlinking - Lots of people fear duplicate content and this is the main reason that spinning software is so popular. In actual fact it doesn't matter if your content is duplicated in terms of the links you get from each, the only problem with duplicate content is that search engines do not link to index it. The solution to this is to just make sure you post the content on your site first and wait for it to be indexed before submitting it in other places.



2. Link wheels are unstable - Yes link wheels can be a very powerful structure to use for your backlinks but they are also very easy to trace by search engines.
(Link wheels are basically when you have lots of web 2.0 blog type sites that all link to eachother, and all also link to a central site that you are trying to rank)
In essence there would not be any point of a link wheel unless you were using it for SEO purposes would there? Search engines hate SEO because it essentially is the practise of trying to trick them into thinking your content is more relevant then it is with smartly places keywords and other tricks. Because of this they are likely to quickly disregard your link wheels once they discover them (which is not very hard).

To combat this you need to make sure each of the outer sites of your link wheel (the web 2.0 ones) are all good sites in themselves. You need to spend time on those sites making them relevant and authoritative (well to a degree) then it would be much more natural for them to link to the other sites in the wheel as they would all be large-ish, relevant sites in the same niche.



3. PR is important - well yes PR is a virtual construct created by Google, so outside Googles results it really has no bearing, but Google is after all the largest search engine around, so PR is a pretty good estimate of authority.

Saying that, it is much wiser for you to spend a lot of time trying to get one high PR backlink, then lots of low PR links because PR works on an exponential scale.

This mean that if PR0 had a link value of 1, PR1 would have a value of 10 (this is not the actual value used, but it is good for an idea). Following this on a PR 5 link would have a value of 100,000, so getting one PR link would be worth 100,000 PR0 links. Think about comparing this to a directory article, it is quite likely that this submitted article will have a PR of 0 or 1 at best, so creating one high quality article and guest posting on a PR 5 blog would be worth 10,000 to 100,000 articles submitted. Now once again these are not exact numbers, or maybe even to close, but from what I have learned they are a good estimate.



4. Just creating backlinks is not enough - This goes to say that you should not just submit your backlinks and leave them. They are going to be much more effective if the search engines can find them to index them or at least take not of their existance if they were duplicate content for example.

To do this you need to spend a little extra time on your backlinks so they are more obvious to the search engines. A simple way to do this is to ping them with a service like pingoat which sends out notifications to various directories about the link.

Also featuring the backlinks in RSS feeds is a good way to get more exposure to the search engines.

There is no point submitting 1000 backlinks if the search engines only find half of those so it is important to spend a little extra time to save yourself a lot of extra work.


5. It is important to Drip Feed. Drip feeding is when you slowly add content and backlinks to your website. Though this can be done by giving Google more incentive to find your backlinks at a drip fed level. By this I mean pushing to get them indexed at a slow and more natural rate by pinging them, making RSS feeds to submit to directories or social bookmarking them.

You have to let the search engines notice your links at a rate relevant to the size of your site. If your site is PR8 then they can expect to index thousands of links a day to it, but if it is a new PR0 or PR1 site it would be normal to assume you wouldn't naturally have that many links going there. I stress the word naturally because SEO is in a sense unnatural and it is trying to trick the search engines into ranking your site.

You need them to believe your site is any other normal, interesting website that is not trying to get artifically ranked.


6. .edu and .gov backlinks. Now this is a bit of a hard subject and one of the myths that I personally am least sure about (so if anyone thinks different and has a valid argument then I am more then happy to change things).

To the best of my knowledge the search engines give no preference what so ever to .edu and .gov backlinks. Really as far as I know they rate most of the suffixes of websites the same (well at least the usual .com .co.uk .info .org etc.).

But I also know that search engines like Google have methods of placing sites in order of preference beyond PR. Site carry an authority and if they are a .gov or .edu site the chances are that they are a respected establishment.

Because of this I think that perhaps getting links from here is better then the majority of sites at the same PR, but not necessarily because the site is a .gov or .edu, just because it is a respected authoritative site. This would be the same story for any niche authority site regardless of it's web suffix.



Well guys those are the ones that spring to mind off the top of my head. Once again these are to the best of my knowledge so please no yelling at me if anything is incorrect !

Hopefully others will contribute to this and it will be a valuable resource to newcomers.

Cheers for reading people,
Kind Regards,
Connor