So, I took a good 3 hours out of my day, sat down at my ThinkPad and plunged deep into the realm of the best link building services available.

What I Found And It Ain’t Pretty

It’s not like I didn’t presume this would be the case, but it was still shocking to see how many hardcore, blackhat link building services are actually out there. From one to the other the major characteristics I found were the claims of building hundreds and even thousands of links almost instantaneously.

I suppose the hardest thing for me to imagine was there are people out there who still get suckered into these services. Let me explain a little further.

More Links Does NOT Always Equal Good SEO

Let’s go back a few years to the time when reciprocal linking was actually beneficial in the search engines. At the time the most popular strategy was to BUILD, BUILD, BUILD! Eventually like it always does, the algorithm changed and those sites found pointing back to the sites in which their own links appeared on, suffered a huge slap across the face!

That’s why today when you run analysis on a domain registered for over 5 years, you will see a ton of backlinks. Their position in G however is another story and usually not a very nice one.

The Best Link Building Strategy = CONTROL!!

There’s a reason for why the best marketers retain the top rankings in the search engines and it’s got to do with controlling the links coming into their sites.

Paying a service to essentially spam your site with hundreds of links that you don’t get to pre-approve, will NOT I assure you result in anything beneficial for your site.

Instead try focusing some time on finding quality links up for grabs in some of the most popular locations like the Digital Point forum. Open a new thread asking others to contact you if they have sites relevant to your own. You then have the chance to run some analysis before proceeding usually with a link sale but sometimes a straight trade for content.

Essentially if you aren’t in control of your links, then you’re not in control of your business.

Something to think about.

I felt it necessary to discuss this particular topic as it’s fairly obvious a large number of marketers tend to get caught up in focusing a lot of time on a small number of specific unwanted backlinks. The accumulation of low quality backlinks is in my opinion something not worth giving any focus towards.

What are Considered to be Low Quality Backlinks?

Simply put, low quality backlinks are those which appear on pages considered by Google to be either; irrelevant to the topic on your page, blacklisted, or those which exist on a page with zero pagerank.

An example of a common low quality backlink would be that which appears on a page with pornographic material(if of course the page it is linking too on your site is not of that nature )

Links on pages with zero page rank tend not to have any affect on the quality of your site in relation to search engine rankings. Plainly put they can just be disregarded.

Blacklisted links are the worst, but extremely unlikely and again can almost be disregarded.

Can They Be Prevented?

The prevention of low quality backlinks indexed by the search engines isn’t possible. All indexing is of course outside of your control as it is done through a separate entity…search engine spiders.

The ONLY way to remove such links would be to manually contact the site in question

The Effects of Low Quality Backlinks in the Search Engines

Pointing to the best source ever, which is the reason for this whole discussion in the first place, the recent post on the Google Webmaster Blog entitled – “Dealing With Low Quality Backlinks” suggests the need for panic in relation to the discovery of poor backlinks is in most cases unnecessary.

They suggest that “if you happen to see some low quality sites linking to you, it’s important to keep in mind that linking is just one aspect among many of how Google judges your site.” They also mention that “unique, engaging content” is and I quote again “a huge factor” in their algorithm, leading one to believe that the weight given towards external backlinks is in some way evenly distributed among the other factors.

They aren’t lying, unique content targeting specific keyword terms and other onsite SEO construction methods do play a major role in a pages ability to rank well, however like all great PR stunts, this post is little misleading when taking into consideration Google’s ongoing desire to push marketers towards ONLY focusing on content, rather then THE most important aspect of ranking…quality external backlinks.

But enough ranting on the subject of misleading quotes. There was an important peice of information they did supply and I quote, “Generally, you as a webmaster don’t have much control over things like who links to your site. You do, however, have control over many other factors that influence indexing and ranking” which brings us to our next point…

What to Focus on Instead

As I mentioned previously the likelihood of unwantingly gaining a REALLY bad link is very low, therefore other things should require a much larger focus. Imagine this, you have a system which is constantly building new, highly-relevant backlinks via; article directories, blog networks and forum posts. In reality for every BAD backlink you gain, you will end up replacing it with another 20 high quality ones.

In short, why focus on removing a small number of low quality backlinks when you could be spending your time focusing on building high quality ones instead?

Josh Stanton
SEODrift.com

Technorati Tags: low quality backlinks

For WordPress blogs any link campaign should take these two factors into consideration; firstly a decision has to be made on what the most important pages are that you are attempting to rank in the search engines and secondly(this mainly applies to article marketing as a means of building backlinks) how relevant the information is on the page where the link is located.

A lot of marketers tend to get a little lazy, thinking that it’s better to churn out a lot backlinks fast, funneling them through the index page. Definitely you would have seen great results using this method a few years back, but as the competition increases, it’s only obvious that the need for a more focused SEO campaign would result.

Firstly decide which pages on your blog target the keywords that are the most valuable when considering buying preferences.

For example if you have a fat loss blog, more then likely an attempt to rank for a certain product name keyword would be suitable. Decide upon your top 5 most profitable blog posts as these will now be the main focus for your SEO campaign.

Now to take the second factor into consideration. Another time waster that a large portion of the community takes part in, is the lack of care when it comes to really deciding upon which page a link should appear on.

As the search engine algorithms move closer and closer towards extreme relevancy, it starts to become clearer that the positioning of links will play a major role in deciding their long term value.

Therefore take your time in deciding the pages where your backlinks will be situated. If you are running an article marketing campaign, match your articles up to the posts that are most relevant before publishing them with the link contained within of course.

Relevancy is vital, therefore take your time to decide now or else the results will clearly not roll in your favor.

Should you link back to your index page as well?

Yes of course you should definitely continue to create backlinks for your home page. The idea with this approach is to rank as quickly as possible for a small percentage of your pages, those of which are most likely to make you money right away.

In time as your site begins to gain some authority in the engines, you will then start to improve your rank for pages considered as the ‘major players’.  Remember if you have a silo format setup correctly on your blog, all page rank and link value will be funneled evenly throughout your site anyway.

I talked more about siloing your blog in the previous post.

Josh Stanton
SEODrift.com

Technorati Tags: backlinks, SEO