The Value Of Links
There was a time when link building was a simple affair.
Find lots of websites that Google and the other search engines thought to be 'of authority' and use them to simply link back to your website (obviously making sure you tagged your keywords within the link).
The general rule of thumb was "If you have more links than your competitors, then you would outrank them".
But since these days, things have changed.
The main difference of course is that the online world has become increasingly popular and that brings much bigger competition as millions of new websites get launched every day.
We now find ourselves at the stage where competing for rank on short tail keywords (those of less than three words) has become almost impossible.
In fact, we are now at the stage where many longer tail keywords are becoming exceptionally hard to compete for too.
Of course one solution is to find a range of keywords that have high search numbers and low competition (there are millions still left of these fortunately), but there will soon come a time when the list begins to get exhaustive.
And sometimes there are reasons why businesses need to be chasing certain keywords and key phrases even though they know they are unbelievably competitive.
In these cases, the old trick of simply building more and more backlinks no longer achieves the results it once did and the reason is simple.
Google realised these situations were likely to occur some long time ago and to overcome the problem, it started to give a value to every link.
We started out where links from high domain PR's (page rank) would attain a higher value than those from low domain PR and temporarily the problem abated.
The consensus was simply that the domain PR would pass through into the inner pages of a website and the link value would be given based on the Page Rank of the homepage.
But SEO experts cottoned on to this quite quickly and soon everyone was building links from websites with high PR.
Google needed to re-evaluate these values again - and quickly.
So now we have the position where the domain PR is largely irrelevant (although in almost every case, a homepage will have a higher PR than a websites internal pages).
In order to get backlinks that also have good link value, they must be posted onto internal pages that ALSO have high Page Rank or directly onto a homepage itself, where the domain PR is good.
And this is no easy thing because in 95% of all websites, whilst the domain PR is good, the internal pages will be much lower and probably have no page rank at all.
The evidence of good link value can be seen when analysing competition in a research tool such as Market Samurai.
Time and time again, when looking at the top ten sites for a keyword you will find sites with 100 links that outrank others with 30,000 links.
The reason is simply that the links they do have are of a much higher value than the competitor with thousands.
There are of course ways to get links with good value from inner pages with good PR (or even homepages), but they come at a price.
The owners of such sites are fully aware of the situation and for them to give away prime space on their valuable assets, there has to be something in it for them.
Most likely it will cost money (look at it like selling advertising space) or it may come in the form of a link exchange where you give them a PR6 to get a PR3 back in return! So if you are intending going after high competition keywords, be warned - you may have to delve very deep into your pockets!
Find lots of websites that Google and the other search engines thought to be 'of authority' and use them to simply link back to your website (obviously making sure you tagged your keywords within the link).
The general rule of thumb was "If you have more links than your competitors, then you would outrank them".
But since these days, things have changed.
The main difference of course is that the online world has become increasingly popular and that brings much bigger competition as millions of new websites get launched every day.
We now find ourselves at the stage where competing for rank on short tail keywords (those of less than three words) has become almost impossible.
In fact, we are now at the stage where many longer tail keywords are becoming exceptionally hard to compete for too.
Of course one solution is to find a range of keywords that have high search numbers and low competition (there are millions still left of these fortunately), but there will soon come a time when the list begins to get exhaustive.
And sometimes there are reasons why businesses need to be chasing certain keywords and key phrases even though they know they are unbelievably competitive.
In these cases, the old trick of simply building more and more backlinks no longer achieves the results it once did and the reason is simple.
Google realised these situations were likely to occur some long time ago and to overcome the problem, it started to give a value to every link.
We started out where links from high domain PR's (page rank) would attain a higher value than those from low domain PR and temporarily the problem abated.
The consensus was simply that the domain PR would pass through into the inner pages of a website and the link value would be given based on the Page Rank of the homepage.
But SEO experts cottoned on to this quite quickly and soon everyone was building links from websites with high PR.
Google needed to re-evaluate these values again - and quickly.
So now we have the position where the domain PR is largely irrelevant (although in almost every case, a homepage will have a higher PR than a websites internal pages).
In order to get backlinks that also have good link value, they must be posted onto internal pages that ALSO have high Page Rank or directly onto a homepage itself, where the domain PR is good.
And this is no easy thing because in 95% of all websites, whilst the domain PR is good, the internal pages will be much lower and probably have no page rank at all.
The evidence of good link value can be seen when analysing competition in a research tool such as Market Samurai.
Time and time again, when looking at the top ten sites for a keyword you will find sites with 100 links that outrank others with 30,000 links.
The reason is simply that the links they do have are of a much higher value than the competitor with thousands.
There are of course ways to get links with good value from inner pages with good PR (or even homepages), but they come at a price.
The owners of such sites are fully aware of the situation and for them to give away prime space on their valuable assets, there has to be something in it for them.
Most likely it will cost money (look at it like selling advertising space) or it may come in the form of a link exchange where you give them a PR6 to get a PR3 back in return! So if you are intending going after high competition keywords, be warned - you may have to delve very deep into your pockets!
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