Yesterday's Advanced Link Building session of Search Engine Strategies
featured WebGuerrilla President Greg Boser, an infamous Google spammer,
on the same panel as Google's Director of Technology, Craig Silverstein.
Silverstein, who’s been with Google for five years, has
seen the evolution of the importance of links. He said a page’s importance
equals the aggregate importance of pages linking into it. He also
said this method is highly spam-resistant. Of course, this isn’t anything
new but these words of wisdom are refreshing to hear from Google.
The
Dark Side of the Force: "Link Skanks"
“You want sites with high Page Ranks to link to you,” Silverstein
reminded everyone, “and not to other people.”
He recommends using descriptive anchor text and steering away from
phrases such as “Click Here.” Get similar sites to link back to your
site, attract links with relevant content, and most importantly, he
said, “avoid anything that looks skanky.” This includes link farms
and anything deceptive. “Don’t link into bad neighborhoods,” he warned.
The “skanky link” reference got a rise out of the audience and quickly
became a running joke for the rest of the panel.
One interesting tidbit: the Googlebot pays a lot more attention
to page content that visitors can see rather than things people can't
see. That’s the reason why Google dropped meta tags.
Apparently, hyphenated domains have also come and gone. This used
to be a popular method for spamming search engines but now keywords
within hyphens don't matter as much as they used to. Craig pointed
out that it’s better to use hyphens than underscores because within
Google’s parsing policy underscores in domains are treated as letters
while treating hyphens are viewed more like spaces.
He also recommends you put descriptive words in page titles and URLs
as signals to the users. Any signals to the users will be perceived
as being good in the eye of the Google algorithm.
Greg Boser's three goals of link building:
1. Do whatever it takes to avoid reciprocal linking. Ideally, just
have other sites link to your site.
2. Develop an inbound link structure that will help your organic search
listings
3. Develop something that continues after a person quits promoting
a particular campaign. This includes link-building programs through
content syndication, web tools, or desktop applications.
He said it’s important to realize that guestbook spamming, log file
spamming, and blog spamming may all result in penalties. He pointed
out that there are entire industries supported by spamming Google
but all the search engines are currently combating search engine spam.
If what you're doing is too similar to what the “black hats” are doing
you might get lumped in with them. Boser doesn't recommend making
changes based on what you’re seeing now.
He also pointed out that any link coming in from a nonprofit organization
is gold. He wasn’t necessarily implying that nonprofit sites have
better quality content, but these links are often less expensive and
tax-deductible. Often times they'll put up a link to your site for
$200 per year. He cited networkforgood.org
as a good source for finding these sites.
Don't get caught up in ODP, he recommended, saying there are sections
of the directory that are dying. There are plenty of other links on
the web that will prove to be just as beneficial. His advice is to
“submit, move on, and forget about it.”
Yahoo! Search Technology: Take
it for a spin About the Author:
Garrett French is the editor of iEntry's eBusiness channel. You can
talk to him directly at WebProWorld,
the eBusiness Community Forum.
This is unbelievably complicated. I was happier
not knowing. There is no way for me to determine my PR or
anyone else's. So what am I to do? Not link to anyone? I read
forum after forum, and everyone says, "Get more links."
