2.3. It’s Just Common Sense
The Search Engines have been giving more and more weight to inbound links...
They establish the credibility of the “linked” site. An in-pointing link from a quality, related site tells the Search Engines that another Webmaster thinks highly enough of your site to link to it. In other words, the link counts as a vote of confidence.
The more highly the Search Engines regard the site that provides the link, the more powerful that vote. In our porcupine example above, the fact that the single most important site in the whole world about porcupines provided a link tells the SEs... wow, this is a great site!
And if it came from the home page, the SE knows that is “valuable real estate.”
If you reason it all through, it’s just common-sense analysis of human behavior. The SEs are putting humans to work for them, using their judgment (something the SEs lack) to tell them what is relevant and good. That (along with a bunch of other off-page criteria) gets factored into the overall equation before the engine delivers its SERP for “porcupine mating habits.”
The only links that matter to you are links from quality sites with themes related to your business. For example, having a link from the authority on porcupines is a good thing. However, having a link from an online gambling site is not. Best case scenario of off-target inbound links? The SE ignores the link altogether.
Moral of the story? Obtain quality links from quality sites with themes related to your business.
SIDEBAR
Contrary to what you may read elsewhere, link popularity/reputation is
not the only weighting factor for rankings. It is likely not even the
most important one.
The actual content on a page will always be important. I can’t see how on-page criteria would ever become irrelevant to an engine.
And other off-page criteria are growing in importance (the engines like to keep these quiet).
So... do not obsess and lose days over building and monitoring link exchange programs. That’s 20-80 behavior, instead of 80-20. Beyond a certain point, you get very little extra return. And, if you do it wrong (by following many of the “quick-and-easy” link exchange methods/software), you can seriously hurt yourself.
Most sites do not have many (if any) in-pointing links. If all sites had hundreds of incoming links, link popularity/relevance would be weighted more heavily by the engines. But most sites simply do not have that many incoming links -- if the engines weighted links too heavily, you would put 99+% of all Web sites at an insurmountable disadvantage.
What does this mean to you? Two things...
i) Since not many sites have many incoming links, this is an opportunity for you to grab an edge. If you are close to the Top 10 for your keywords (say you’re scoring #11-15 consistently), improving your link popularity might provide the extra oomph you need to tip you onto the first page of search results.
But then again, building more Content-Content-Content that PREsells will likely ultimately deliver ALL the off-page criteria that engines seek -- and the additional Content Pages give you more and more pages that could be found by the engines!
SIDEBAR Special Tip: Always remember to ask your link partners to include
your most important keywords in the actual link text of your in-pointing
link. This will give your site added relevancy for those keywords. For example, SBI! Product Manager, Paul Crane, asks Webmasters
to link to his Ultimatefatburner.com Web site like this... Reviews of Fat Burners, Diet Supplements, and Weight Loss Programs! And not like this... See the difference? The first link provides his site with additional
relevancy for the keywords “fat burners,” “diet
supplements,” and “weight loss programs.” The second link
provides no boost.
ii)Improving link popularity/reputation is more useful if you are trying to win for tough, general words like “e-commerce,” “computers,” or “sports cars.” It’s kind of like...
... the golf pros on the
PGA Tour. They are all so good, that the difference between them is
razor-blade thin. Every little edge is important.
The problem, though, is that you may need thousands of inbound links to play in that league. Try this little experiment...
Go to Search It!...
Choose the Competition category in STEP 1...
Next, choose Back Links to SITE (Yahoo! Search) in STEP 2 (the Google option is better for finding links to specific pages)...
SIDEBAR
Take a look at the entire STEP 2 drop-down menu for the Competition category.
It provides unparalleled efficiency for assessing your competition in more
ways than merely inbound links.
In STEP 3, enter the domain name of the site that ranks highly for competing porcupine-related keywords at the major engines (you can use Search It!’s Straight Up or Metasearch categories to find those sites.)
Then click on the Search It! button -- read the tutorial on “back links” (AKA “inbound links” or “incoming links”). And then click to see how many links go to that site.
Repeat for as many competing sites as you like. Here’s what you will find...
A wide scatter.
In general, sites that score in the Top 10 for extremely popular keywords (i.e., high DEMAND) have more in-pointing links. It simply takes better off-page criteria to rank highly for the super-competitive keywords.
On the other hand, sites that rank well for more esoteric words usually have lower in-pointing link counts (especially to that particular page). You can often get a Top 10 for low-demand words purely on the strength of on-page criteria.
And one more observation... you will note that some pages with fewer links score higher than others with more links. More proof that inbound links are not “the all.” Yes, sites with more inbound links deserve to be ranked higher (especially if those links come from important, relevant sites, etc.). But SEs are simply way too complicated to pay too much attention to any one criterion.
SIDEBAR
In general, it’s not a good idea to compete for general keywords
such as “travel” --leave that to Expedia! The key to success is
building a tightly themed niche site. Make Your Content PREsell!
explains how to find the perfect niche, position it well, and deliver it in
your own unique voice that visitors find appealing...
MYLW: <<2.2. I Have This Friend 2.3. It’s Just Common Sense 2.4. The Bottom Lines>>
