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Readers and e-mailers ask me pretty frequently what makes a link a good link.

 

I am talking here about external links (back-links), not internal ones. This does not mean in any way that internal link building is unimportant or easy. Au contraire. But the hectic yet hazy world of back-link building has always been the subject of much more scrutiny and bigger hype than the one of internal links  (Most likely because successful external link building is so much more dependent on other parties, i.e. on potential link partners).

 

Whenever the topic of external link building comes up, I sometimes pull an old analogy of mine out of the sock drawer. (Those of you who know it, please stop yawning and scroll down until you see uncharted territory).

 

All others might be interested to hear that I like to compare external link building to social interactions which happen in real life.

 

How so?  Well, simply imagine 2 people, we’ll call them Jamie and Terry (both unisex names …). They live on the same block but that’s all they have in common. Let’s compare:

 

 

	Jamie	Terry
Disposition	Relaxed	Hectic
Lifestyle	Quiet	Hyper
Letters received	A few bills	Lots of friend mail
e-mail received	Some (1 address)	Tons (6 addresses)
Phone calls	A few	Phone rings off the hook
Party Invitations	Some	Tons
Visitors	Few	Lots
Being talked about	Little	Much

Which of the two is more popular ?  A no-brainer, isn’t it ?

 

I am not suggesting that a quiet life is inferior to an active one, or that a phone that rings off the hook is a good thing. Also, being hyper isn’t necessarily being happy, and a low e-mail count doesn’t mean Jamie is a nerd. We are not labeling, just recording facts.

 

And the fact is that Terry is more popular, in the sense of getting much more attention by friends and other humans than Jamie does. If you were to assign a value to Terry’s level of popularity, you would say, for example, Level 5, while Jamie’s might be Level 1.

 

The practical consequence is that to be at Level 5, Terry doesn’t have to actively search for friends and to reach out to a great extent (some effort is of course needed to actually keep all those friends), while Jamie would need to work very hard to reach it. The corollary is of course that to reach, say, Level 7 (even more contacts), Terry would need to put in some work - but Jamie would have to make superhuman efforts to ever get there - if he ever gets there. 

 

A similar situation applies to websites. Here, your “friends” are your inbound links, and popularity is measured in Google Page Rankings. The difference between people and businesses is that while in social life some people like it less hectic, I have yet to see a business website that’s satisfied with getting just the occasional visit.

 

We all know that inbound links to your site are an expression of recognition, of wanting to be connected to you. But what are the most important characteristics of a good link?

 

Let’s first use common sense. Would Jamie or Terry like to receive unimportant mail, or befriend unwanted, unpopular people? I don’t think so. How about getting “sorry, wrong number” phone calls, mistaken invitations, or other irrelevant contacts? No. Finally, would they like to be called names or titles which make it impossible to identify them? No way.

 

Our analogy is back again:

 

  Importance of friends / contacts = Quality / importance (=PR) of linking site

 

  Relevance of mail or calls          = Topical relevance of links

 

  Correct Name                           = Keyword-rich text links (anchors)

 

These 3 factors are generally considered to be the most important components of any good inbound link.

 

Some SEO colleagues and link building specialists advocated other factors in recent interviews. Link expert Eric Ward attaches importance to the identity of the linking site, the intent of the link, and the linking site’s own back-link pedigree. Another link expert, Debra Mastaler, says the age of the page which hosts the link is significant.

 

In my own humble opinion, Eric’s and Debra’s points are, while well-taken, essentially variations on the main theme: the quality of the site from which a link points to you.

 

So, get to work. Build link relationships that will give you relevant, quality links, tagged on your link partners’ sites with keyword-rich text. Google will reward you.

 

Any questions? You are welcome to contact me via my SEO Consultant site for free tips.

 

 

 

As the probably most important off-page SEO factor, back links (aka inbound links) pointing to your site are generally weighted by number and relevance. The more links a site has from authoritative and related sites / pages, the better ranking potential it has. In addition, proper use of anchor text can also boost your SERPs (remember the Google Bombing Story?)

Today we’ll discuss a different aspect of link building – what is the optimal rate (and speed!) for link building, and will a site be penalized if it gets too many links over a very short period? This deserves some discussion because there is still confusion out there.

Let’s use a fictitious scenario to illustrate my point. Let’s say I have some, ah, rare and, ah, very interesting celebrity photos that have never been seen before and are therefore guaranteed to create a huge buzz . I put them on my website and they are picked up by CNN and some other major news outlets. Soon, all major social networking sites and forums are talking about these photos, thus creating links to the site. Then, millions of visitors hit my site for a peek and start referring the photos to each other, thereby creating tens of thousands of additional links to my site (OK, daydreaming stops here).

Will I get red-flagged by search engines for getting a huge number of links overnight? I don’t think so. I am basing this opinion on the axiom that search engines are smart enough to recognize these links as coming from all kinds of sources (news, social networking, blogs, forums, images, and so on). After all, in this fictitious case study I did not launch a link campaign ; all those websites spontaneously linked to me. My site’s popularity may have mushroomed quickly, but it did so naturally, not artificially.

Of course, the above scenario is very much the exception and was only used for illustrative purposes. In real life, if you have a new site or are using mainly link farms (which, as we all know, are frowned upon by search engines) or directories to direct traffic to you, I suggest you slow down and get more focused on link quality and relevance to avoid setting off alarm bells with Google.

We should all be so lucky.