Getting Good External (Inbound) Links
As I mentioned in article “Google Webmaster Tools Part 2″ the best way for your website to climb up in search results is getting a lot of quality links. “A lot” means as much as you can (refer to article “Google Webmaster Tools Part 2″ to see what term “quality links” actually means). So how to get quality links? Here’s how search engines like Google imagine link building:
- your website has quality content
- other people like content of your site and they put link to your website on their websites
- those websites are related to yours and anchor text of inbound links is related to content of your website (term “anchor text” is also explained in article “Google Webmaster Tools Part 2″)
It is so called “natural” link building. Every link is “vote” for your site. In Google, the importance of every web page is measured by Page Rank. The value of Page Rank can be from 0 to 10. Page rank depends on number of inbound links and Page Ranks of web pages containing links to your website (I think that PR and quality of websites linking to your website is more important then number of inbound links). For example if someone puts link to your site on web page that has PR 5, that will positively affect PR of your website (actually, every page on web site has it’s own PR, usually the page with highest PR is home page because home page receives most links).
Let’s get back to main topic of this post. OK, you need to get as much quality inbound links as you can, and you work very hard, but your site is still on 5th page in Google search results for relevant phrase and you have small number of visitors. Unless you have something really unique to offer to your visitors, it will take very long time to build enough quality inbound links to be listed on first page of Google’s search results for certain phrase.
Is there solution for this situation? There is, but Google considers that way to be unethical. The fastest way to make many inbound links is to buy links. It looks simple, you buy links on relevant web sites with high PR, and quickly your website becomes more relevant and better positioned in search results.
What Google wants is to present the most relevant websites for certain search term. But, if you invest enough money you can artificially make your website relevant simply by paying for links on popular websites. Last year Google began to penalize websites that were selling a lot of links (their PR was lowered), but websites linked by paid links were also penalized.
It is OK for Google if someone sells links with “NOFOLLOW” attribute. Nofollow attribute in link tells Google’s bot not to follow that link, so that link will not have effect on PR of linked page. Penalized sites are now selling links with “nofollow” attribute. Those links will bring new visitors to your site, but they will not affect your site’s PR and position in search engine results.
It doesn’t mean that Google prevented selling links, no that industry is still alive. But, if you want to buy links you have to do it smart. If you buy links on popular website with lot of traffic, and that website is selling links without “nofollow” attribute, it is only matter of time when Google will penalize that site, but more damage will be done to your website, which has low PR and it is struggling to get better ranking in search results. By being penalized you can loose moths of work to get PR 3.
Popular websites are also known by people who work in Google. Google still didn’t invented algorithm for discovering websites that sells links with “nofollow”, simply someone reports that somebody is selling links. After logging in to Google Webmaster Tools you’ll see link”Report paid links”. So how to buy links and not to be penalized by Google? Read in next post….
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