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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.

 

 

 

In the search engine optimization industry, Black Hat refers to techniques that are against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Some spamming gimmicks do provide short-lived gains for keyword rankings, but the rogues get penalized eventually, just like they used to in those old-fashioned movies. A decent SEO consultant will stay away from unethical tricks even when a clients impatiently itches to cut corners and thinks he can outsmart the search engines.

At the same time, however, our SEO industry would be boring without Black Hat, just like a John Wayne movie without a bad guy. I actually enjoy studying some rogue incidents in a clinical fashion ; here are some thoughts.

I have to say some Black Hatters are quite smart and creative in trying to get where they want without incurring penalties ; sometimes they can even win the hide-and-seek game, albeit temporarily. Unethical SEO means experimenting, and exploring uncharted territories. It also takes an enterprising spirit to try to outsmart Big Brother, and some good acting to manage that wide-eyed, innocent stare after being caught red-handed and black-hatted.

Some cases can be quite entertaining. You can find many on Google Webmaster Help Forum . I came across one thread by a webmaster named, let’s say, Jane Doe, and trust me, you’ll soon see why I changed her name (who needs a lawsuit?). Jane complained that Google had delisted many dozens of her sites for no obvious reason. She claimed she couldn’t figure out why she was “mistreated” because all those sites were manually built, not auto-generated, and provided content on a variety of topics.

She listed several of the penalized sites for analysis. There seemed nothing wrong with them. If you took her story uncritically and at face value, it really seemed that Google  had wrongly accused poor Calamity Jane of unethical practices.

Comments from helpful users poured in. One pointed out that many of the sites in question looked like they had been created primarily for the purpose of link exchange. In response to that, the webmaster explained that she hadn’t done it intentionally for PR or link popularity reasons since she “would have known that excessive link exchanges on the same IP block would be flagged.”

Wow. Was she really unaware ?

A reader “proved” Jane could not be White Hat because nobody could build, upload, let alone manage so many sites. And while such evidence would be inadmissible in a Court of Law as speculative (Lawyers, anyone?), it certainly sounds logical. With more people joining the thread and providing analyses, it became even clearer what happened: most of the sites were single-page or few-page affairs with nothing but several paragraphs of duplicate text, AdSense ads, affiliate promotions and exchanged links. That’s a serious breach of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, especially when we are looking at dozens of such sites. Black Hat wholesalers, as it were.

For a proof reader or a decent SEO person the mystery was not difficult to reconstruct: Our friend Jane had simply shuffled and reshuffled the paragraphs on corresponding pages of the different sites, with only minor changes within the text itself. She thought Google’s machines wouldn’t uncover the plot. A human might find out, she figured. But who cared about humans as long as Google was fooled ?

But, alas, Google wasn’t. (Hey, it had slapped even stolid, solid BMW not so long ago).

However, Jane still believes she’s innocent and wonders if she can visit Google and talk to the engineers in person to resolve the penalty issue. An amusing piece of wide-eyed chutzpah, reminiscent of the proverbial guy who killed his parents and then in court pleaded for clemency on grounds of being an orphan.

Who says SEO can’t be fun?