SEO Blog

Links are the through-ramps of the World Wide Web. Used to move website visitors from point A to point B, links are the sinew that bind all websites together. Because links are virtual recommendations from one page to another, Google based its original page sorting and ranking algorithm, PageRank, on judging the importance of a web-page by the number and caliber of links directed to that page from other web-pages. Ten years later, links remain one of the most important elements weighed by Google when ranking individual web-pages.

Actually, the word important is sort of an understatement. Links are gold at Google. A well optimized website with strong and highly relevant incoming links is going to rank well at Google. In our practice, this is a truism that is very rarely wrong.

Google appreciates SEOs when they work to make websites better, more accessible and usable. It has supported the sector with information and access and even dedicated the time of several of its long-term engineers, most notably Matt Cutts, to communicating with the SEO industry.

Google does not like the SEO industry when it feels SEOs use their knowledge to seriously “game” the search engine. Nobody likes it when irrelevant web pages come up under numerous keyword phrases that have little to do with the topic of the page. While it gives plenty of support when SEOs stick to the Google Webmaster Guidelines, Google tends to come down hard on various SEO tactics when those tactics are misused or abused.

That brings us back to links and how SEOs have used them. Since 2004, links building has been an essential part of effective SEO services. Getting good, topically relevant links to a client’s website(s) is one of the bedrock foundations of a long-term SEO campaign. The problem is, getting those good links has always been difficult, time consuming and expensive. Doing it right requires more manual labour than any other facet of SEO. Metamend builds links by hand and very hard work but you can be sure if there was a more efficient way that did not violate our reading of Google’s guidelines, we would use it immediately. As it stands, hard work is the right way but hard work carries heavy labour costs.

The only way to avoid the expense of building links by hand was to buy them. The moment links became important, they became a virtual commodity and the visible measure of a page’s link-passing value (also known as PageRank or PR) became the basic barometer for the cost of a link. Organizations like Text Link Brokers started making enormous amounts of money because they had the ability to sell something which worked like high octane gasoline.

Just over a year ago, Google expressed extreme outrage about paid-links by devaluing the visible PR and in some cases the actual ranking of sites that sold links to other sites. That move made those links relatively worthless. That’s about the time the gentle art of linkbaiting became brutal competition in the search engine optimization sector. Linkbaiting is all about using a NEED TO CLICK NOW headline to bring visitors (and hopefully permanent links) from other sites. This, of course, led to an unnatural number of “man bites dog” stories, along with a slew of wildly inaccurate but highly tempting headlines.

Consumer savvy has put a damper on linkbaiting as users are tending to be more discriminating of which links they follow, leading to greater creativity from SEOs chasing links. The entry of search marketing into social media applications, book-marking sites and social-recommendation websites is partially a reflection of SEOs looking for other places to gain links from. Frequently, the social media sites have found ways to decrease the value of links leaving their pages in order to prevent their systems from being gamed by link-chasers.

While Google tightens its link valuations and social media sites work to devalue links leaving their networks, the competition to get front page placement at Google gets fiercer and fiercer. Some search marketers have even gone as far as spoofing fake news stories and getting them printed in high profile places. Recently, one of those stories was exposed as fake, causing an enormous outcry in the mainstream media (partially because the mainstream media was utterly fooled and partially because the mainstream media is so vulnerable to being utterly fooled), which universally ran the story without fact-checking it first.

Google is well aware of these practices and is constantly working to tweak its methods of weighing the value of incoming links. Those methods are getting even more stringent as Google moves further towards localization and personalization of search results. A link leading from one page to another might be more valuable to Bostonians than it is to Seattlites, for instance. That link will likely be valued higher in Boston related search results than it will in Seattle related search results.

As Google’s methods of judging links matures, the practice of building links will mature. Based on three specific and totally unrelated conversations I had yesterday, I expect we will see a few months of weirdness in relation to the value of links. To be honest, I can’t claim to be sure exactly what that statement means but my stomach is pretty sure it is a correct one. I suspect local and personalized search (in advance of the growth of mobile in North America) is the reason but, as with all subtle changes at the major search engines, only time will tell.

In the meantime, Metamend will continue to build links the old fashioned way of heavy research and hard labour. I have a feeling that link-building method will be the way long into the near future.