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back links

Backlinks commonly referred to as ‘inbound links’ are critical to the visibility of your web pages in the search engines and attracting visitor traffic. To understand backlinks there are three things you need to consider, the source from which the backlinks come from, the anchor text of the backlinks and the content of the page to which the backlinks sends the visitor to.

The amount of backlinks

The volume of backlinks to a page is one of the elements the search engines take into account when deciding how to position the page in the results displayed to the searcher.

The source of the backlinks

The source of a backlink can pass authority and indeed visitors to the page to which it points. But ‘votes’ cast via backlinks from trusted or authoritative pages to a page have greater influence over the search engines view of this page than backlinks coming from pages with less ‘trust’ or authority. Government (.gov) and educational (.edu) sites are good examples of sites that are authoritative and trustworthy.

Google Page Rank

Google has the notion of ‘page rank’, this is the value indicator it attributes to a page it considers to have accumulated authority over time from backlinks pointing towards it.

The ‘anchor text’

When you see a backlink on a web page it normally has a label a word or text related to the information at the page to which this backlink is pointing, what this ‘anchor text’ says has influence upon the value the search engines give to the link. Relevance is the guiding principle for the majority of search engine mechanisms and therefore if the information on the page is about ‘drying chillis” then it is from a search engine’s point of view, more valuable for the backlink’s anchor text to this page to contain the word ‘chilli’ as opposed to a related term such as ‘drying spices’.

Common problems

Many people mess up their backlinks building activities because they fixate on quantity as opposed to quality of backlinks. Having a substantial volume of backlinks to your page doesn’t automatically mean the search engines will view your page as relevant.

How to manufacture backlinks

So here is my tried and tested guidance for getting backlinks to your pages, good visibility in the search engine results pages and the right type of traffic to your site.

1. Selecting the right keywords from the outset is critical.
2. I always set out to put together a keyword cloud.
3. You should always start by identifying a key word or phrase which has a good traffic.
4. To work out the volume of visitor traffic is being coming from searches for my top level keyword I use the Google keyword analyzer tool.
5. I analyse words and search phrases relative to my primary phrase and create my ‘cloud’.
6. From this cloud I generate a library of content containing articles, videos and blog posts each with backlinks labeled with the right anchor text and then utilize a portfolio of content distribution systems to disperse my content to a wide range of directories.
7. When I author content I do so with the searcher in mind so as each item of content attracts backlinks to itself as well as sends backlinks to my target pages.

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how to get more backlinks

Phew, this is a big subject and I need to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know in my research at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority – explained

The more authority your web pages have the higher you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your information. The good news is that authorities trusted by humans are also trusted by Google. A good illustration is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These domains imply they are trustworthy sources of information and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your web pages will send authority to your site. Another perfect example is Wikipedia as the contents here are mostly authored by by tribes of people as opposed to a single person.

So it follows that authority is significantly influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative web pages link to your web pages then you inherit their apparent trust and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and so the trust in your content by Google goes up.

How Google pronounces what is and isn’t authoritative is confidential for good reason and aligns with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the net needs is someone exploiting the mechanisms that Google untilzes in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most important technological asset of this period in history.

How not to get Authority and Backlinks

In the same vein it’s worth my while stating some common sources and practices of building backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘’categorize as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of severity, the prime offenders are:

• Paid backlinks – hubs where people buy and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that have links on blog pages that are just not related to the main theme.
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
• Rapid backlink growth – there are a large selection of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t stupid. Any sudden rise in the amount of backlinks is going to show up on Google’s radar, specifically if it’s a brand new domain.
• Backlinks from bad reputation sites – these are particularly henous as you are guilty by association – need I say more.

*There is another factor where I may be on dodgy ground, but major press portals seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely seen significant quantities of the same content over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as a portion of of the results I am seeing go against the normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….

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