Hopefully, most marketers know enough about SEO to realise that incoming links to a website (also called backlinks) are a big part of the search engine algorithm that determines which site to rank before another. Getting links to your site is important if you are trying to rank for a highly competitive keyword or phrase. In fact, getting a first page listing for a competitive keyword on Google without any links is near impossible.
What you might not know is that it’s getting harder to generate these links within the guidelines of the search engines. Previously, you could (if you wanted, although it was never recommended) buy large quantities of links for your website to increase your link authority. But, in the last year, Google and other search engines have cracked down on this, so if you are buying large quantities of links you could get banned from the organic search engine listings. And rightly so, as the organic listing is about relevancy and equal playing fields as opposed to buying your way to the top.
Quality not quantity
The initial idea behind the use of link measurement as an indicator of relevancy was that a link to a particular page is equivalent to a ‘vote’ by the linking page for the linked-to page.
In short, this would enable the search engines to measure not only the relevancy of the content, but also the number of votes it had. This model of taking links as votes as part of the search engine algorithm did have cracks in the formula as it didn’t consider quality of content, trust metrics or semantic relationships, leaving the formula vulnerable to manipulation by spammers.
But, as the linking algorithm has developed, the search engines are now not only measuring the number of links as pure votes but also measuring in detail the relationship between a linking page to the linked-to page. Today, factors such as the relevancy of the content from the linking page to the linked-to page, keywords in anchor text (the actual link text), age of domain, analysis of IP addresses, reciprocal links and domain registration are all factors that helps the search engines determine if the links are valuable organic links, or if they are manipulative, artificial links created solely for ranking purposes.
When it comes to analysing the content for the linking page to the linked-to page, semantic attributes of the on-page text surrounding links is also analysed. For example if a link to B2B Marketing’s website is in the middle of a page about medical equipment, that link won’t be considered as valuable as if the link was on a page with content about best practice search marketing in B2B.
Relevancy and trust
The major challenge for the search engines has always been about relevancy and intent. Just because a website has mentioned a keyword a few times doesn’t mean that page is the most relevant to a search query. And just because a web page has lots of incoming links doesn’t make it the most relevant. So the search engines have to further develop their algorithms to include analysis to improve the quality and measure intent as best it can.
The complicated part is not keyword optimisation or generating links, but the areas in between and the off-page factor most people think they have no control over. Instead of investing money in link building for quantity, you should spend time creating relevant content on your site. The information should not only make other sites want to link to your site, but also persuade high authority sites with related content to want to link to your site. For example, a link from a trusted site such as the BBC will be worth more than thousands of links from a new website with no authority.
Search engines are, after all, computers with robots/spiders indexing content, whilst their huge database index serves results based on a programmed algorithm that forever changes to strive for better results.
Human touch
A computer will never be a human and can never measure human behaviour such as intent into a mathematical equation. Therefore, it’s crucial to create rules and best practice guides to help webmasters adhere to the ideal way of optimising a website, including building links.
Currently the only way search engines can measure intent is human interference. All search engines have huge web spam teams that sift through content. So if you feel tempted to purchase thousands of links, remember this is likely to be outside the search engine guidelines and you can get caught and blacklisted.
So keep it relevant, both from a content point-of-view and link generation, and you will be better off in the long run. But if you do, and it all goes wrong, there’s always social media.
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