Backlinks - Anchor Text - Link Juice - PR - Authority Sites - ALL EXPLAINED!!!

Hey,

Thought it was about time that i shared some of my knowledge for free to all of you here. It's not often that i do share knowledge for free with everyone and normally just do it on an individual basis, however i learnt from people sharing so ive decided that im going to start sharing more now than ever before.

So backlinks and getting those top spots in google seem's to be the talk of the town (or at least the forum) for a while now so im going to have a shot at explaining some of the basics to you all and try and get rid of some of those mis-conceptions.

So where to start?

Backlinks - These if you didn't know already are simply links pointing to your site/article/blog (something you made/own). The more of these you have the better however there are better backlinks to get than others. These are based on two things -> PR, Traffic. However backlinks is still mostly a number game, the more you have the better. But with high quality backlinks you need alot less than you do with low quality ones.

Anchor Text - This is the text that is in the nice blue colour like this (or in this case black and underlined). It is simply the clickable text that sends the visitor to your site from your backlink. The anchor text is very important as its what google reads and thinks ooo the site they are linking to is related to the hyperlinked anchor text and so we will give them a boost for that keyphrase. Resulting in higher rankings for that keyphrase.

Now the problem with anchor text is that if you have too many backlinks (a high %) with the same anchor text then it looks un-natural and google doesn't like that. So vary your anchor text sometimes, even just putting it into the plural sense is enough, or slightly rewording it.

Link Juice - This has become the term used for passing on the brownie points to your site from your backlinks, or passing on the juice. The juice is measured by the PR of the site the backlink is on (both the homepage and the actual page that your link is contained on) and it reduces in power the more sites it links to.

Think of it as you being a site and people come to put links on you and you are holding a pint of milk and have to share it between them. Then they each get an equal share.

Then if you don't make your outbound links to other peoples sites nofollow then you will be giving their site some of your milk juice too that you have worked very hard for.

So the sites with a higher PR will give your site more juice and means it climbs the google ranks very quickly compared to sites with hardly any juice and a low PR.

PR - This is not very compared to when it was first introduced however it serves as an indication of how much juice a site has. Plus it does have a small effect on which sites rank top in google so it is usefull to get.

You ideally want to be getting backlinks from the sites with a higher PR over a lower PR and if you get those high PR backlinks then your site will also recieve a PR rating too.

Authority Sites - These are the sites that google favours over any others on the internet. They usually rank very high on google naturally and if you can add content to them then you are going to be on an easier ride than creating a new site or content on an un-authority site. They need alot less if not any backlinks to rank top either, so you save yourself alot of time too.

The way you can tell an authority site from a normal site is because they are the ones that appear in the top of google for most keyphrases. However certain niches also have authority sites too.

Some examples of authority sites are: wikipedia, yahoo answers, youtube, hubpages, squidoo etc

If you wanted to know all of them then just take a look down the alexa top 1000 sites and the ones you typically recognize are considered authority sites by google.

Similarly if you can get backlinks from these sites at the very least then google will favour you too. Especially if it is from google controlled sites such as blogger and youtube.

Common Mistake with Backlinks: Getting backlinks from sites with un-related content does not matter. It is still a backlink and if it is from an authority site then it is even better no matter what the content is about.


Now to get your articles/sites/blogs etc ranking as high as possible make sure you optimize them for a keyphrase or if you are even smarter then keyphrase's. Then backlink backlink backlink from high pr and authority sites and if your feeling a bit adventurous then get some .edu and .gov backlinks too as they have a hell of alot of authority and gives a massive boost in the google rankings.

Also beware of the google dance and google slap... do not build too many backlinks at once... 20 to 30 a day with a brand new site is plenty and give it some breathing time so that it settles down in a position in google and then build more to get it ranking higher. I also ping each place that i get a backlink so that they are indexed quicker and you receive a higher ranking alot quicker than you would waiting for the bots to crawl those sites. It will only take about 1 to 2 weeks before you see some good results but it can depend on your keyphrase too and its competition.

Just don't give up!

I hope this small guide helps some people as it certainly took a while to write and make sure everything i am saying is correct because SEO in general can be a difficult thing to explain.

Tom Brite