Diversify Your (Link) Assets SEOs and site owners the importance Google places on links. Unless you're stuck in the early part of this decade, however, you know that it's not just the quantity of links that matters anymore. It's the quality. If you want to rank high in the SERPs these days, it's better to get links from high-quality web sites than spammy ones. Chalk this up to changes in Google's algorithm, some of which may be geared to catch link buyers and sellers. From Google's point of view, purchased links make up a kind of noise that searchers don't need to hear. It's not just single links that Google looks at, however; it apparently looks at your link profile as a whole (among other factors) when determining your ranking. Such a big picture view gives Google a better idea of who thinks your site is worth linking to. So if Google is looking at all of your links as a whole, what is it looking for? “Increasing importance seems to be attached to having a natural, diversified and well-rounded link profile,†notes respected SEO Chat forum member PhilipSEO. He distilled his understanding of today's most important link building factors (and how to do it) into a thread that's well worth reading. But here I'm just going to extract one part of that thread and talk about what you're aiming for. A diverse link profile includes relevant links, of course, but these links should come from a wide variety of pages. They shouldn't all come from blog posts forums; rather, they should come from “authority sites, academic sites, forums, blogs, directories, discussion groups, fan pages, social media, consumer information and review sites,†just to name a few that PhilipSEO listed. Google also expects to see different types of links â€" a mix of nofollow and do follow links, for instance. Diversity is also important for your anchor text. Just because several links point to the same page doesn't mean they should have the same anchor text; indeed, if several bloggers link to the same page naturally, one would expect them to use different words. Just think of how many different ways there are to indicate a cell phone: smart phone, smartphone, mobile device, cellular phone, even car telephone and several others that aren't as commonly used. Since we're on the topic of diversity in anchor text, don't forget the long tail! Taking one of SEO Chat's sister sites as an example, someone linking to an article on Dev Shed might use anchor text as diverse as “PHP tutorial,†“Swift Mailer tips,†“Building an e-mail application†and so forth. If they all describe the article, such diversity makes perfect sense. Longer-tail keywords particularly make sense as anchor text for deeper links. Using the same example, a blog post about one of Dev Shed's tutorials might link to the first page of the article with “Swift Mailer tutorial†as the anchor text, but use “blind CC Swift Mailer code†to link to a later page that specifically focuses on that detail of building an e-mail program. If you've written high-quality linkbait, of course, you should have a lot of natural links to it. While such linkbait may lead to spikes, “it is supposed best if your link profile develops at an even-paced, randomized, 'natural' tempo without obvious major spikes or long interruptions,†PhilipSEO observed. From what I've seen and heard, Google is fully capable of making appropriate allowances for the kinds of spikes one would expect from linkbait, so you don't need to worry about your content making your profile look unnatural. You do need to worry if you ARE doing something unnatural to build your link profile â€" such as buying links. So plan to build your link profile as you would build your retirement portfolio: gradually, over time, and by attempting to build in diversity to help you reach your goals. Good luck!
Read the relevant forum thread. |
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