You have perhaps been told that getting links from other sites related to your own website genre is generally a good idea. Perhaps you have even gotten not a few email requests to this effect.
Most of us search engine optimization followers have a deep understanding of what this terminology means, but for the non technical it simply means getting others to link to your site from their own.
Traditionally, this was done by asking friends and foes to link to you, and whole communities even encouraged this but Yahoo Google and MSN soon began to devalue these reciprocal efforts because Tom would call Harry, Bella, Davis and Susan to ask them to link to his site and Google particularly thought that this activity was simply contrived and not natural.
Spam is known by some as that cheap meat in a can, but in internet lingo it is also known as the process whereby a few tech savvy individuals attempt to gain unfair advantage by flooding areas of the internet with their own commercial resource.
As an example, some marketers send out unsolicited comments using software robot programs - to create thousands of backlinks automatically in forums, blogs and other places. Some made hundreds of real but content-less webpages/sites with links back to their own - not the phrase “their own” - commercial products - thus creating a need for Google and other search engines to objectively create quality ranking scores to determine the relationship between linking sites. In those early days, the search engines were not looking at some of these things such as which reciprocal links were owned by the same group or which chain of anchored links were sharing the same IP Address. In order to thwart the spammer type group, this data is collected and analysed as it’s rather important for determining exactly who the spammers are.
It is said that successful backlinking depends very heavily on the keywords one chooses - traditionally, this has been where most linking efforts have fallen down.
Why? We can’t specifically tell others to use such and such an anchor text in their link to us. And in direct contradiction to what you might be reading around the net, therein lies a big part of the problem, right?
Secondly, since as a casual reader, one is not likely to be an expert on long tail keywords, one is going to most logically try to pick the keywords having the most traffic. Is this a mistake? A brand new online venture, even after being indexed by Yahoo or most search engines, typically has no chance at ranking on its chosen keywords for many months if not years.
So, possibly a waste of time, right?
The potential problems don’t stop there. Initially a new html or htm page has a Google Rank of N/A. Then after its indexed, typically 0 where 0 is worst and 10 is the best. Although some may argue this while a new page with N/A or O as its rank can have a freshness quotient that can help it positively, in most search engines, its zero which is evidence of lack of backlinks will definitely work against it.
Exceptions abound however and if the newly created page is sitting on a grandly popular web2.0 social network property like squidoo or craigslist, bebo or scribd to name a few then it won’t be penalized as much just because its current pagerank or credibility level appears to be a zero.
As the examples of exceptions above clearly show, it is thought that new pages on foundation sites such as those with a credibility level of 5 or above, inherently acquire some of the PageRank or PageTrust of the site that they are actually hosted on.
All sounds rather complicated huh? What really, does one do ?
Many seo experts might say, go back to fundamentals, content and get creative. They would recommend strongly that you even create “link-bait” that will cause others to want to link to you.And that’s inherently a great idea if you can get this very weighty idea to lift off the ground any at all. Ignoring Google’s advice is always done at your own peril, however I urge you to examine the issue more deeply. Do you really have 3-6 months that it takes to consistently create new articles on a daily basis, and to publish a huge amount of high grade material in one spot that would cause people to consistently put a link to that page from their own - If the answer is yes, then you now know the true meaning of link-bait.
There has to be ways around this. What should one do?
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