April 2006

Google rolls outs changes over past 6 months. Many sites report drops in rankings as a result.

We’ve talked about link popularity and the importance of having other web sites link to your web site in the past. Most major search engines perform a ‘Linking Analysis” to help determine how relevant a web site is to the keywords being searched on (this is often referred to as Link Popularity). Basically they look for other related web sites that include links to your site (incoming links). Some, but not all, of these links from other sites may be considered “votes” by the search engine for the importance of a web site. So it's important to have links to your web site in order to improve your results with search engines.

However, ever since search engines began performing this ‘Linking Analysis” as a variable in the ranking of search results people have been trying to influence the rankings using methods the search engines consider to be SPAM such as participating in link farms or exchanges, reciprocal linking primarily meant to increase link popularity, etc. In addition, many webmasters purchase links on other sites or submit their sites to low quality directories primarily trying to increase link popularity.

Over the last six months or so we’ve seen Google roll out updates to it algorithm (the programming and calculations it does to rank the results of searches) apparently depreciating the value of many incoming links. Many sites have reported drops in rankings as a result.

Link Building Suggestions

We thought this would be a good time for us to repeat some of our suggestions about linking:

We suggest only looking for links to your site on 'quality', industry, related sites, directories, etc., that can bring targeted traffic to your site. Consider the ranking boost you may get from these links an added bonus.

Reciprocal & Outgoing Links

Moreover, be very careful with reciprocal links (exchanging links with another site) for a number of reasons -

First you risk loosing your visitors by sending them off to another site.

You risk sending them to a site where they may learn about more of your competition. You should think twice about adding a link to another site if it includes a large number of references, ads, and other links to your competitors

You risk being “penalized” by search engines if you participate, even inadvertently, in the reciprocal link 'farms' and other schemes that are out there.

Every link from your site (outgoing links) should be evaluated carefully. We suggest only putting links to other sites if those sites provide useful information to your site visitors. Anything that makes you site more useful to your potential visitors is a usually good thing. If you do include links to other sites try to include them within the text of pages on the site instead of or in addition to the typical 'Links' page.

Incoming links

Outgoing links can make your site more useful, but it’s the incoming links to the site, links on other sites that point to your site, that are most important. These links can bring traffic to your site, traffic that may convert into inquires, leads, subscriptions, memberships, sales, etc.

The best way of increasing incoming links to a site is by creating a site that other sites want to link to because of the useful or creative content on it.

If you are trying to reach top positions for very competitive keyword phrases you may find that the competitive pages reaching top results in the major search engines have hundreds or even thousands of incoming links pointing to site. In order to compete, you may need to add lots of useful information and creative content to attract links too. There’s even a new term about this, Link Bait: developing a site that other sites want to link to.

As we do a link building and promotion campaign we learn about your related online community and look at what your competition is doing. As a part of the campaign we develop ideas for you to consider to build your site into a site that others will want to link to.

Many of these suggestions mean adding more content to the site. Adding more content usually helps improve search results in other ways too. The search engines will index much this new content and it will be available to be returned in searches. Also, you’ll likely be updating the site more often with all this content. When search engines detect continual change they usually come back to the site more often looking for changes.

See Strategic Link Building, Online Advertising & Promotion for more information