Link Building

The Primacy Of Links

Understanding link building is essential to a correct understanding and implementation of seo. Websites are evaluated by the search engines in two primary areas: their on-page and their off-page factors, and when looking at “off-page” factors, historically we have been talking about backlinks. In case you should ask, “What then is a backlink?” -  A backlink is a mention of a website which includes a hyperlink, (a clickable link), for that domain url. E.G.

Orange Whale Ltd are an internet marketing Company

The backlink here is “internet marketing company” which is a link to our homepage.

The text used in the construction of the backlink is called “anchor text”, so, for instance, different people could link back to my site with a variety of different anchor texts, such as “seo expert”, “seo specialist”, “Specialist seo Company”, “internet marketing Company”, and so on.

Backlinks serve two essential functions in regards to the search engines. They build up credibility for an individual website, and they also build up context and meaning around that website, which in turn allows the search engines to rank that site more effectively and accurately. The meaning devolves from the anchor text used, for obvious reasons. The credibility bestowed by backlinks resides in Google’s scoring system for websites. In a somewhat hermetic process, websites with many incoming links grow in Page Rank; i.e. the more backlinks a website has, the more popular it is, and therefore the higher authority it is accorded, as designated by the Google Page Rank system. In turn, when a high Page Rank site links to another site, it confers its authority on the site it links to. The way this works in practice is that a few links from very popular and authoritative sites, say Wikipedia and the BBC, are worth exponentially more than thousands of backlinks from low Page Rank sites. Wikipedia and the BBC are in fact both Page Rank 9, which is as high as Page Rank goes.

Link-Building On The Personalized Web of Web 3.0

Whilst the term “off-page” factors is used almost exclusively to refer to backlinks, in point of fact, backlinking is not the only off-page factor, contrary to what some people may say. Another powerful off-page factor is non-hyperlinked referencing. If the social sites, (e.g. Twitter, Digg, Reddit) are replete with mentions of a particular person, Company, or brand name, that can have a strong influence on how Google ranks the site associated with that entity. Which in fact leads succinctly to the next point. Traditionally backlinking has been viewed as a monotonous numbers game, a simple matter of accruing a large volume of diverse links, with as many high page rank links as possible. But these days backlinking, whilst not in the process of being deprecated, is certainly undergoing a transformation. The exact nature of the change is unclear, because Google has never published their ranking factors, but seo practitioners are starting to see significant changes in the way sites are evaluated. Backlinking seems to be of less importance than it once was, whilst the way backlinks are evaluated, and ultimately, the way Google stratifies, manages and orders the web seems to be in some sort of state of upheaval. There is in fact a growing belief in the seo community that the Page Rank system is being deprecated, and a more substantive, socially oriented system is in the process of being rolled out, under the banner of Google+1. The early manifestations of this are an apparent decrease in the significance of standard backlinks, along with a greater amount of clout being afforded to social mentions, and social referencing. This change however, it is worth stressing, is not an evanescent one, it seems to be a structural and methodological one.

In light of all this, backlinking is a challenging environment these days. Our overall attitude at Orange Whale is that the key to long-term success is to create engaging content that people will link back to naturally. In much the same way that an item on your local TV news station is great publicity, naturally engendered publicity, in the form of backlinks and mentions from high authority sites are the goal of any seo campaign. These kinds of positive backlinks evolve from a successful business whose content has been properly syndicated, and whose online profile has been properly developed.

It is also important not to lose sight of the fact that backlinks not only influence search engine rankings, they can also drive traffic to websites. Our objective at Orange Whale Ltd is to generate backlinks that improve ranking and generate traffic without contravening Google or any other search engine’s terms and conditions.