Bob and Marlene are members of their local chamber of commerce. Bob owns a used car dealership and Marlene owns a travel agency. Both enjoy strong search engine rankings for their business websites. At a recent lunch event they found themselves talking about their websites while sharing a table with Rachel whose real estate website was no longer doing well in search even though she had once hired a search marketing consultant.
Rachel’s consultant told her that Google ranked websites based on links and because real estate is so competitive she should cultivate a large number of links. He called it the Power of Positive Linking or something. Since her business operates as part of a much larger real estate chain, those links shouldn’t be difficult to find but getting a lot of them might take time.
Based on his advice, Rachel set out on an ongoing link-trading mission. Any opportunity to trade links with a contact was taken, often successfully. Schools, bakeries, independent shops and small businesses, parents’ groups and service organizations link to and from Rachel’s site. She got a lot of links at the same time after getting involved in a couple different real estate link exchange programs. Over time she had acquired the number of links her consultant told her it would take to do well on Google or Yahoo but her rankings had dropped dramatically.
Bob and Marlene were sort of surprised. They had also hired search marketing consultants on the advice of their web designers but hadn’t heard about the power of positive linking. It had never occurred to either of them to cultivate links from all their contacts. They had always left stuff like that up to their staff and search marketing firms. Rachel was quite insistent about links, pressing Bob and Marlene about theirs.
Bob did his best to describe where his site linked to but had difficulty telling her exactly who linked back to him. His IT guy works with an outsourced search engine optimization firm. He did know that his business has strict policies in place about referencing customers to other related services having written them himself when he opened the dealership twenty seven years ago. That policy extends to all aspects of corporate communication, including the website.
Links from Bob’s business lead to a few local automotive services Bob has done business with over the years, other affiliated car dealers, and to manufacture and service websites for the types of vehicles Bob’s car lot sells. He has no reason to link to unrelated businesses and each link that leaves his site has to be considered a professional recommendation by his business.
As far as he knows it, most of the local businesses his site links to link back to him. After all, they have been doing business together for years. Being part of a larger affiliated group of dealers, he gets a lot of links from other cities which generally result in parts or service requests. Bob also remembered being a part of a couple car enthusiast groups where he has been linked to by other members in posts and on their websites.
Marlene described a far more complex structure of links leading to, from and around her business websites. Being a travel agent, Marlene has used the Internet to expand her business while saving her clients some serious money. Operating out of an older shopping mall in the north-east end of a small west coast city, Marlene has managed to open virtual travel agencies in major urban centers across the country.
Like Rachel, Marlene tends to operate as her own IT department but she does have an in-house SEO she relies on to keep her placements strong in the markets she targets. Following the advice of her in-house SEO, Marlene has built her virtual businesses to appear as close to her brick-and-mortar operation as possible, sort of like a franchise chain that appears far larger than it really is. She even goes as far as hosting each virtual business in the respective regions they serve. Because the businesses are designed to appear to be a chain, each of them link to the others.
Marlene also links to destination information sites, discussion forums, rental information and family travel sites. Her intention is to provide as wide a spectrum of information for her clients as possible. She rarely expects a return link from sites outside the network of related sites she owns but does have some from the blogs current and past clients.
The major difference between linking strategies used by the two search-successful businesses and that of the un-successful one is intention, the “why” of how a link was placed.
For the businesses of Bob and Marlene, links appear as assistance or enhancement for site users. For Rachel, links were thought of as a tool. Rachel describes a process of actively collecting reciprocal links wherever they can be found regardless of relevance. Bob and Marlene, on the other hand, have links built into their sites based on user relevance. That many of those links become reciprocal (A links to B and then B links back to A), is a non-issue because the reciprocity is natural and not part of an obvious scheme to increase the relative search rankings of their sites. It’s not the reciprocal nature of links, it’s the intentions with which they are placed.
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