This is an article in relation to a recent post released at the Google Webmaster Central blog regarding the effects of the accumulation of low quality backlinks.

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

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