What are your thoughts on getting better links to your website?
When you create a site, unique and compelling products or services content is what matters most. How can you make yours different from all the other sites on the web? Your customers will link to you when they think it's great and that will happen naturally. But, you can also look for opportunities for links too - not just by emailing a webmaster asking for links but expanding in the same way you'd expand your business. I.E., forging partnerships and adding value to others.
Links are a big part of our PageRank algorithm which is a major component on the 100's of items in it. Links are not just based on quantity but more so on quality. We know on a link by link basis what is valuable to what and we value them all differently. It is done algorithmically and we also have a manual spam-fighting team. Just because you have a lot of links doesn't necessarily mean you are getting value. Look for quality links not quantity.
What this says to me is that you really should balance out the type of links that you get, dont go after lots of profile links to all of your sites, use article, videos, podcast, rss, press realease's, hub pages, squidoo, flicker, ehow and any large well know site and base the links on topic because it offers more to the searcher who is more likely to link to your site. And if you do have profile links fill out the profile and add some content about you site just in case the manual spam team have a look at your links.
The commentary they made about forging partnerships was interesting, but it also made me wonder about how that looks.
Looking around at some of the more popular trend/news sites I noticed some of the writers for those sites had subtitles that lead back to their own blog. Then it reminded me of the blog guest posting thing. That seems to be along the lines of what they are talking about. Though I think it could go further.
A few years ago there was a growing trend, and I think it's time to bring it back.
... does anybody remember the little badges people used to (and still do) offer about a review done on your site, and it got like 5 stars, and there was a page on the site that gave details on your site. So of course, you put that badge up on your site because hey, what better way to show trust than a 3rd party saying you rocked right?
I can remember something about Google not liking this. Mainly because it got picked up by the IM world and morphed into other things. I think something similar to that where you do have some interaction with a site owner would be beneficial. Imagine for a moment that within your super ranking page it includes reference to the top 3 other 'related' sites with nice little gold stars indicating who they are.. and that doesn't link directly to them, but to an internal page about them, which then links to them.
They don't have to be related directly. Suppose your page is about I don't know, baby food. A related link might be to a webmd page, or to a specific doctor who writes something about baby food. I guess the best example might be how wikipedia uses related links. It doesn't have to be something that damns your own attempt to sell a product/service though. Also by setting up that other link to be an internal link to another page, you increase your page views, showing ou are giving the user what they want, and of course you got another opportunity to advertise on that page.
Consider this, if that link was not on your page, they would have bounced to hit google again. You can now engineer the pages as 'rescuep pages knowing that your site hasn't given them what they want, so this is your last chance to grab them.
Then there is just the straight link exchange, which still works great. I believe there is a step by step here at BHW from bobbylove that explains this in detail. Great method.
Let's take it a step further...
Blog Commenting
We all know it, love it, but we leave a lot of money on the table for it often times. This is just an idea.
With whatever you use, take the blogs that are PR4 to PR8 that you have in your list that are nofollow, and do some real commenting to them several times. go about the site and comment on various posts with some real thought.
After that, contact the blog owner, tell him you been reading his blog and commenting for a little while, and ask to do a guest post on yadayada. It's obviously going to be on something you offer at your site, and if it's a fit for his readership, he will be more than happy to get some free content. Obviously you include a link, which will be a d0follow, and you might even score a sitewide link in their blogroll.
This will go a long way, both with his readers, and with the site owner. Who do you think he is going to recommend everytime your site subject comes up? You.
I think this is one way to interpret the idea of forging relationships. I think they talk about this because this would certainly be a big part of the Web 3.0 schema in the
future for personal search. eg. That blog you just created a relationship with may have a reader who subscribes to it via rss. When they go searching for baby food, your site comes up as #1 because of that relationship.
As I have noted many many times in this thread from my analysis, the number of links certainly did not help in most cases. I saw time and again sites that had tens of thousands of links get smashed with pages with 10.
Quality of links might be interpreted as link diversity as well. I did notice though in the information that they talked about the site becoming established and then later getting into the social networking circles. That seems to indicate that there is a progression that they expect from how and where a site gets linked to and discovered.
I theorized this about a week ago here in another thread (I think it was nofollow vs. d0follow). The idea is to just think about a site and how it would launch, and what kind of real human interactions woudl take place for links to be developed to it vs. what most of you all here do using tools to blast out getting links from where ever you can.
I should probably take a closer look at that process.
Those are some of my thoughts on this for now. I hope others might be able to further comment on links and how they might affect your quality signals and ways to get these 'partnerships' that the glady mentioned.
