External Link Quality - stay on top of your inbound links
Appropriate External Links to Your Website are Crucial!
Your whole goal with an external link building program should be to secure inbound links from trusted, quality sites with relevant content/placement with regards your own website. A link from a site that has a high level of content about your website's keywords or main content topic is likely to provide benefit to whoever clicks the link and therefore provide a greater user experience.
The whole goal of links should be to provide the visitor further information and advice relevant to their needs so having quality links coming in to your site tells the search engines that your site is relevant and provides useful content on a subject matter
“Link Quality - aim for links that drive relevant and targeted traffic so that all visitors find your website engaging and beneficial”
Attempting to Manipulate Page Rank through Linking
Google have stated page rank is no longer a ranking criteria yet inexperienced and just plain out of date SEO companies still attempt to gain inbound links from high page rank website's in the hope of increasing your own page rank in the thought this will lead to higher organic SERP positioning.
Working on just increasing your website's page rank is a time consuming and pretty much pointless exercise (unless you are a SEO company being paid to spend the time doing it of course...). If the search engines suddenly pick up on a sudden increase in totally irrelevant links from high page ranking sites then the good money is on these sites being downgraded in the search engines view and the links themselves being ignored or worst case counting against your website's SEO attempts.
Website Links and a Link Quality Example
From a search engine point of view which of the below links would you deem to be most relevant and therefore which would carry more weight
- A page rank 7 website link that is on a page of other links to totally non related businesses or services - visitors to this page rarely click your link and when they do they arrive at your site and click away straight away
- A link from a page with no page rank but is all about product a that your company sells stating you sell it and referencing your website as a source for full information on product a and as the place to purchase.
Yes the first link may send more traffic initially - however this is more than likely going to be completely irrelevant traffic and the search engines are going to realise this.
The second page may send less traffic but the traffic they do send will recognise your website as a valuable resource and you will invariably get the added bonus of the search engines recognising your site as a valuable resource plus more profit generated from the visitors that do come - this is an example of good link quality!
Web Spamming and Link Quality
With the wealth of Social Media Resources on the web a whole new breed of Search Engine Marketers and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) companies have appeared. These are companies designed to manipulate the Social Media Resources to help in your website's SEO efforts.
There is a right way to utilise these and correct Social Media Marketing is something we actively encourage as part of your overall SEO strategy. Here at DeGal SEO we have a targeted Social Media Marketing service and you can read more on this here.
Web spamming is a bad way to social media market. Basically you inundate blog's, forums and other social media platforms with links to your website. Your posts will generally be totally irrelevant to the rest of the page and these actions will annoy just about every other person and will see you banned from posting etc (just look at something like Yahoo news where news comments are allowed and there is always one poster just posting to some dodgy medicine/porn/viagra/cheap electrical goods website link until the post is moderated and the comment removed).
Paid Links and their Link Quality
Previously Page Rank did play a role in the SERP's but due to the manipulation and abuse the major search engines now disregard it. Buying links purely to gain page rank or manipulate your search results is against the major search engines guidelines and can lead to penalties for your website.
This article on Paid Links last updated in October 2009 from Google states that Google do use inbound links to assess reputation (Page Rank can be seen as a form of reputation so is why these companies still feel page rank counts, although as mentioned it is now down to link content and quality for building up a site's reputation).
Link based analysis is used by Google to determine the importance and relevance of your website and ultimately its value to human web visitors. The most important factor is clearly THE QUALITY OF LINKS TO YOUR SITE not the quantity of links so work on building link quality as your SEO process.
You can report sites you find attempting to sell page rank direct to google. This helps Google to detect these sites and penalise companies and website's associated with them.
Avoid Link Farms or Link Exchange Schemes
We can almost guarantee any business with a current company website will have received countless emails from SEO companies praising your website as a relevant site and requesting link exchanges with you receiving a link on this pr4 (page rank 4) or above website's in exchange for linking to x site in return. They will say how good this will be for both businesses... Well the bad news is it won't!