Incoming site links: hard to fake
June 25th, 2008The cool thing about Google’s whole pagerank set-up is that, for the most part, it’s very difficult to game. Roughly speaking, pagerank assigns a value to a website based on the number and quality of outside sites that point to said website. The more links to your website, the higher your pagerank and the higher your site shows up in online search results.
While virtually every other portion of search engine optimization can be gamed to some degree, pagerank is a difficult thing to fake. Of course people have tried all sorts of schemes to increase the number of incoming links to their sites - link farms, paid links, spam links (posted on blogs / forums / etc.) - but in the end, genuine pagerank-enhancing links are made the old fashioned way.
In the early days we used to email folks and ask them to trade links with our sites to build reciprocal traffic (even though there was no such thing as pagerank back then). Today people still try to build links this way but it’s tough work and can come across as spammy to the recipients of link request emails. Even if your emails are genuine and get a good response from webmasters, we’re still talking a 5% hit rate or less - meaning you’ll need to identify and send 100 emails to get 5 new incoming links. Not an effective strategy if you ask me.
Our approach to collecting backlinks is actually pretty simple: we try to create the best content possible. If your site has useful, interesting, and relevant content you won’t need to ask people to link to you - they’ll do it automatically! Focus on making your site useful and not only will you collect backlinks but your users will actually stay on your site longer, generating higher pageviews and perhaps even a little word of mouth marketing for your site.
Now I know, creating great site content is tough but it’s really the only foolproof way I know of building a lasting online brand. A wise man once said “if you build it, they will come” - great advice if you’re considering a creating a baseball field in Iowa. But if you’re launching a new website I like to say “If you create great content, they will visit and link.”
