Link Building: Mislead to Believe

Link Building: Mislead to Believe – Moz

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By: Tripti
March 17, 2009

Link Building: Mislead to Believe

Link Building

This YouMoz entry was submitted by one of our community members. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.

Everyone in the field of internet marketing knows that without link building, your site will not be valued by search engines. Also, we agree that links are a path through which our prospects can reach to us. Most importantly, we need to develop high quality links to outrank our competitors.
Link building is not easy, however. It requires hard work, creativity, patience, and a lot of timel. This job becomes more challenging when you hear remarks like “This technique is not good; it will not work for your website ranking,” “This is unethical,” and much more. In a real sense, these are inevitable comments.
We are constantly being questioned by our clients about what works and what doesn’t work, so I thought I would compile a quick list of misleading link building statements to help our clients.
#1 Outbound links can kill rankings

“Linking out to other sites isn’t worth doing because you drive people away from your website.”
“All outbound links leak Page Rank.”

My verdict: If you send your visitors to useful content often enough, they’ll keep coming back for more.

A site cannot “drop” or “lose” PageRank by linking out. Also, there are few ways of linking to other sites that don’t result in leaks. The best option is to set “rel” attribute i.e., rel=”nofollow”. The fact is search engines not only look how the site links in, but also check how it links out. Sites with a lot of incoming and reciprocal links can only be viewed negatively by search engines.
Tip: Link to websites that will benefit you. Linking to authoritative sources can help establish visibility and build credibility. Outbound links hold a lot more weight than is generally perceived.

#2 Reciprocal links won’t work
A common myth concerning reciprocal links is that if you exchange links with sites, you will not get any value of those links in rankings.
My verdict: It’s not true that reciprocal linking is bad. If you link to a site you liked and this site also link to you (depends on site requirement), there is nothing bad about it. And it will pay you in terms of ranking for sure. Besides, the wrong way of reciprocal linking is creating a link page on a website and then trading links with other websites’ link pages with the intention of “Give link and get link.”
Always remember, Google will never penalize the site that has backlinks coming from relevant and quality sites.
Tip: Stay within your domain and it should not be your only linking strategy.

#3 Link with a Page That has a High Page Rank
Get 25% links from PR-5
15 % links from PR- 4
10% links from PR- 3 and so on….
PR…PR ….PR. One of the major concerns of clients. Even service providers differentiate their services by offering the highest percentage of links from high PR sites.
My verdict: We think it’s totally misleading your prospects. We (SEO professionals) know quality and relevancy is paramount, so why do we always try to fool our customers by using statement like this?
Who says backlinks from PR 5 is better than PR 1? Look at this PR calculation formula:

PR (A) = 1 – d + d ( PR(B) / L(B) + PR(C) / L(C) + PR(D) / L(D) + ….. )
d = 0.85 (damping factor derived statistically)
The final Page Rank of your web page equals to 1-0.85 + 0.85 x (PR/ number of outbound link).
Now, for instance, you have web page A. You are getting links from two pages: one is B and other is C.
Page B (page rank- 5, number of outbound links – 100)
Page C (page rank- 1, number of outbound links – 10)
According to the formula above, if web page A gets link from page B, the final PR will be 0.15 + 0.85 x 5/100= 0.193.
And if A gets a link from C, the final PR will be approximately 0.24.
So you see, the final PR value of Page A will be better if linking with C has PR 1 than linking with a page B that has PageRank 5.

Tip: It is advisable to check the total number of outbound links on a page and the quality of a webpage rather than PR only.

#4 Linking With High PR websites!
“Always Link with High PR page.”
Another misleading concept. There are a lot of differences between websites and web pages.
My verdict: A high PR website indicates the PR of the home page and web page can be any of the inner pages. Google assigns PR only to a particular web page and not to the whole site. Therefore, home page PR cannot pass value to the inner pages of website.
Tip: It is imperative to check the PR of a web page and, most importantly, the relevance of that particular page from where the link is sourced.

#5 Permanent link building
“Links can be permanent.”
This is the biggest myth that makes service providers’ pitch sound compelling to most of their prospects.
My verdict: Links cannot be permanent. Getting links on other sites depends on the webmaster of that site. He can either keep it for long or remove it, all up to his or her requirement. We cannot take direct control on others’ sites. However, we can take assurance from them to keep the links for a particular time period (6 months, 3 months, etc.) and not forever.
Tip: Develop links that can pay you longer, not even stay longer.

#6 Paid links are unethical
There is much conversation around paid links, like:
“Paid links are unethical; Google can penalize you for paid links.”
My verdict: What is the differentiating factor between natural links and paid links? Or how could you detect paid links? No way at all, but there could be guesses about paid links, like developing a large number of links within limited time period, with most of the backlinks from High PR sites, links from irrelevant sites, or many other quality issues. If you know these things can pull Google to suspect your sites, it’s better to avoid these types of links while buying.
Paid links are none other than paid advertisements. If you can post banner and text ads, then why not links?
Tip: For quality links, it would be better to go for experienced and authorized link builders (who know the real purpose of link development and could give your website maximum business) rather than linking networks. Don’t even buy links in bulk and pay for only those links that can return you more.

Hopefully, this post will make customers’ jobs easier and help them to select the best link builder. But to what extent — it all depends on individual perception. I would not say you have to follow my verdict and tips. But I must say to our visitors that they have to be aware of these types of misleading statements and use their own mind instead of following others.

For more link building tips, check out The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building:

Read the Guide!

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