Building link-based popularity

Friday, December 15, 2006

Late in November we were at
SES in Paris,
where we had the opportunity to meet some of the most prominent figures in the French SEO and SEM
market. One of the issues that came up in sessions and in conversations was a certain confusion
about how to most effectively increase the link-based popularity of a website. As a result we
thought it might be helpful to clarify how search engines treat link spamming to increase a site’s
popularity.

This confusion lies in the common belief that there are two ways for optimizing the link-based
popularity of your website: Either the meritocratic and long-term option of developing natural
links or the risky and short-term option of non-earned backlinks via link spamming tactics such
as buying links. We’ve always taken a clear stance with respect to manipulating the PageRank
algorithm in our Quality Guidelines.
Despite these policies, the strategy of participating in link schemes might have previously paid
off. But more recently, Google has tremendously refined its link-weighting algorithms. We have
more people working on Google’s link-weighting for quality control and to correct issues we find.
So nowadays, undermining the PageRank algorithm is likely to result in the loss of the ability of
link-selling sites to pass on reputation via links to other sites.

Discounting non-earned links by search engines opened a new and wide field of tactics to build
link-based popularity: Classically this involves optimizing your content so that
thematically-related or trusted websites link to you by choice. A more recent method is
link baiting,
which typically takes advantage of Web 2.0 social content websites. One example of this new way
of generating links is to submit a handcrafted article to a service such as
https://digg.com. Another example is to earn a
reputation in a certain field by building an authority through services such as
https://answers.yahoo.com. Our
general advice is: Always focus on the users and not on search engines when developing your
optimization strategy. Ask yourself what creates value for your users. Investing in the quality of
your content and thereby earning natural backlinks benefits both the users and drives more
qualified traffic to your site.

To sum up, even though improved algorithms have promoted a transition away from paid or exchanged
links towards earned organic links, there still seems to be some confusion within the market
about what the most effective link strategy is. So when taking advice from your SEO consultant,
keep in mind that nowadays search engines reward sweat-of-the-brow work on content that bait
natural links given by choice.