Quality, not quantity, should be the focus of building links, as presenters at a session on the topic at SES Chicago discussed one of the fundamentals to improving awareness and ranking of a site.
How much time does link building occupy for you? Has quality proven itself over quantity for your site? Discuss your link building experience at WebProWorld.
As Murdok’ Chris Richardson discovered during the Link Building Basics session, gathering links is similar to the way people select leaders, and it parallels InfoWorld’s Brian Livingston’s theory on leadership: who goes to whom with questions? If it’s you, then you’re the leader. When others link to your site, they’re recognizing you as an authority.
According to speaker Eric Ward, link building is the equivalent of doing publicity work. Acquiring links should benefit and promote a site. Not every link has to be for SEO purposes, and keeping SEO as a focus could mean missing out on other good, relevant links.
Editorial links can provide buzz, but passive links appear to be more valuable to search engines. Reciprocal links may be seen as link exchanges, which may reduce their value in a search engine. Links that a site gets that aren’t actively sought seem to be the best a site can get.
Sites should aim to get links because of their quality content. Link strategy should focus on the human visitor, not the automated spiders search engines deploy.
Mike Grehan from Smart Interactive urged publishers to avoid link farms, and not to try faking linkage data by creating false domains to link to one’s site, either.
Once sites start to get links, there are a couple of ways to do hyperlink analysis: PageRank and HITS. Most people already know PageRank, due to Google’s ascendence to search supremacy.
Obsession with PageRank can cause what Grehan calls GAS – Google Anxiety Syndrome. While PageRank is important, he feels it’s not important enough to worry about too much.
The search engines can be a help instead of a hindrance. Grehan noted engines look at anchor text to get ideas about the linked-to page. Publishers can use search engines to find potential linking partners via keywords and phrases contained in anchor text.
Those efforts consume a lot of time, which Grehan sees as being better spent on creating quality content instead.
G3 Group’s director of online marketing Chris Boggs also noted reciprocal links should not be a primary strategy. Too many of those can raise red flags deep within the search engine algorithms, never a good situation.
Outbound links to quality sites don’t hurt a site. Linking out to experts and authorities on similar content areas could be the way to get admitted to those hubs, but the publisher has to be putting out quality content for that to happen. Boggs also made the same point Ward did, in stating that publishers should be more concerned with getting links from sites with good content.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
