The idea that links from other sites to your own, actually aid your site, is a logical one. But can back-links hurt or harm your ranking?
Most of us seo followers know what this terminology means, but for the rest of us it simply means getting links from other sites to your own.
In the past, this was done by exchanging links between sites, and initially search engines had no problem with this but Google and others soon began to devalue these reciprocal efforts due to not just the potential for spam but because a kind of very real link REAL spam that was taking place in this area.
The word “Spam” is known by some as ham, but in internet lingo it is also known as the email that floods your inbox and makes it difficult to find the real mail.
Examples of this, many unscrupulous spam masters send out unsolicited commercial spam email to millions of unsuspecting users. Others created fake websites and pages with links back to their own – not the phrase “their own” – commercial products – hence the need for objective PageRank and PageTrust. At that time, the search engines were not looking at the following things such as which reciprocal links were owned by the same group or which chain of anchored links were with the same ISP. In order to thwart spammers, this info is deemed to be rather important for determining exactly who the spammers are.
It is said that successful backlinking depends very heavily on the keywords one chooses – traditionally, this has been where most linking efforts have hit the wall.
Why? We have no idea exactly how others will link to our online assets.
Secondly, since as a casual reader, you are not likely to be an expert on niche market keywords, one is going to most logically try to pick the keywords having the most traffic. One could however be forgiven for this as it really is a most logical mistake. A very new online entity, even after being indexed by Yahoo or most search engines, typically has no chance at ranking on its chosen keywords for many months if not years.
Ergo, have we looked at a potentially time wasting effort here?
But there is yet another major problem. The page rank of new articles is N/A or after indexing, typically Zero where 0 is not good and 10 is the best. Although some may argue this while a new page with N/A or O as its rank will have a freshness quotient that can help it positively, in most search engines, its zero which is evidence of lack of backlinks will definitely work against it.
But there are exceptions to every rule and if the newly created page is sitting on a highly popular web2.0 social network property like squidoo or craigslist, bebo or scribd to name a few then it won’t be penalized as much just because its current pagerank or credibility level appears to be a zero.
As the examples of exceptions above clearly show, it is thought that new pages on foundation sites such as those with a PageTrust of 5 or above, inherently acquire some of the PageRank or PageTrust of the site that they rest on.
All sounds rather complicated huh? What can a novice do ?
Many seo experts might say, go back to fundamentals, create good and be innovative. They would recommend strongly that you even create “link-bait” that will cause others to want to link to you.Which I also recommend if you can get this very weighty idea to lift off the ground any at all. Ignoring Google’s advice is always done at your own peril, however I urge you to examine the issues involved in creating link-bait more deeply. Do you really have 3-6 months that it takes to consistently create new articles on a daily basis, and to put out such a ferocious amount of intensely likable content in one spot that would cause people to consistently put a link to that page from their own – If the answer is no then you understand why most of us will never ever intentionally create link-bait.
Many more questions than answers, huh?
