It began with Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company’s founders, decided to build a search engine which didn’t rank pages primarily by keyword density like their competition. Early search engines were easy to fool — fill your page with the same phrase over and over and you’d appear near the top of search results for that phrase. Google was different. It let the web itself tell their search engine what pages were about and which were most important. This process is what they called PageRank, and works by analyzing the incoming links to each page.

The idea behind PageRank is that if a page is important, other webpages will link to it. The more important the linking page itself, the more weight that link would have. This system works amazingly well, instantly bringing up relevant pages for almost any search, without giving benefit to “keyword stuffing” and other attempts to trick the search engine into ranking a page higher. It works so well that Google’s no longer the only search engine taking into account links as a major part of their algorithm. All the major players now do so too.

That’s why link building is a key component to any search optimization strategy. However, most webmasters go about it the wrong way. Google and the other search engines need to provide relevant results to searches to stay in business, and it’s a very profitable business they’re willing to put millions into protecting. Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have the brightest minds in the computer industry working for them, thinking up ways to keep the results relevant and filter out the pages that aren’t. Especially in 2006, Google and Yahoo! have put a lot of work into improving their algorithms to reduce the weight of non-earned links.

Link Building the Wrong Way

That’s why link swapping, mass article submission, purchasing links and even newer techniques such as link baiting will never be good long-term strategies. Initially, websites exchanged links with other websites that were complimentary to provide a useful resource for their own visitors. Nowadays, many webmasters will swap links with any site that will agree, or any automated link swap page. These reciprocal links are easily detected by the search algorithms and discounted as such. Trading links doesn’t show the same vote for the quality of your site as a link that isn’t reciprocated.

As the more advanced search optimizers realized their link exchanges weren’t benefiting them as much, they started purchasing links on high PageRank sites. How could a search engine know a link was purchased and not placed naturally? Not with too much difficulty, actually. There are a couple tell-tale signs that could be used to discount links that are likely being sold: the same links appearing on every page of the site, links appearing in a list near the top or bottom of the page without any text around them, links that change every couple weeks or months, links near words like “sponsors” or “advertisers”. There’s also the easiest method of all — finding the site listed on a site like Text Link Ads.

Google’s Matt Cutts commented back in 2005:

“But can’t you just not count the bad links? On the dailycal.org, I see the words ‘Sponsored Resources’. Can’t search engines detect paid links?” Yes, Google has a variety of algorithmic methods of detecting such links, and they work pretty well.

Another common piece of advice you’ll find is to write articles about the topic of your website and submit them to thousands of “article directories” where other website owners can choose to republish your work with a link back to your site. That’s another case of easily detectable manipulation of incoming links. The search engines have had the ability to detect and filter duplicate content for years, and this is no different. Your article will be listed, word for word, on dozens of article indexes, on hundreds of automated content scrapers that pick up these articles to build “made-for-adsense” sites, and maybe a handful of actual sites looking for interesting content to publish. In the end, those backlinks to your site from the article will be discounted for being part of duplicate content — not a vote for the quality of your site from another site.

Link exchanges, article writing, and even purchased text links are not worthless investments of time. They’re only not very valuable as tools for a long-term search engine optimization strategy. Swapping links with closely related, complementary sites your visitors may find useful can lead to increased traffic for both sites from actual people clicking those links. Writing articles and hand submitting them to editors of respected websites can lead to traffic from readers of that article and increased reputation as an expert for you and your website. Even purchased links on high traffic websites have value for the visitors they’ll bring your site. They can be part of your marketing strategy, which includes more than search optimization.

Link Building the Right Way

Last month, Google’s webmaster blog wrote:

To sum up, even though improved algorithms have promoted a transition away from paid or exchanged links towards earned organic links, there still seems to be some confusion within the market about what the most effective link strategy is. So when taking advice from your SEO consultant, keep in mind that nowadays search engines reward sweat-of-the-brow work on content that bait natural links given by choice.

So how do you attract those natural links that matter?

1. Present unique or insightful information. If you want other sites to link to you without anything in return, you need to provide something that’s worth linking to. For most sites, that’s going to be unique, insightful content. Don’t just regurgitate what can be found everywhere else — do your own research, add your own opinions, or present information in a new way. Novel organization or presentation can be as important as the information — differentiate your site from others on the same topic.
2. Build something useful. Create a tool, service or web app which people will want to use. Solve a problem and make life easier. If what you build is truly useful, those that use it will share it, both through word of mouth and linking to you from their sites and blogs.
3. Make linking to you easy. Perhaps most importantly, capitalize on those that may want to share your website but are inexperienced or lazy. Provide “link to this page” code, with well-chosen link text already filled in. Provide buttons and banners with your site or service logo to use. Encourage your users to make use of these tools to share your site.

These methods are a lot more hands-off than sending hundreds of e-mails begging for link swaps. They won’t work as quickly as buying links or auto-submitting an article to dozens of article directories. However, they’re the core of the only strategy that has lasted the test of time, and will continue to benefit your site for years even as search algorithms change and filters become smarter.

Some advice straight from Google:

Our general advice is: Always focus on the users and not on search engines when developing your optimization strategy. Ask yourself what creates value for your users. Investing in the quality of your content and thereby earning natural backlinks benefits both the users and drives more qualified traffic to your site.

This post was inspired by my realization that one of my oldest websites, Website Goodies, recently reached #1 for the popular search “website tools” on Yahoo! and #2 for that same search on Google. The site ranks well for many searches, but those are nice broad searches with good volume that I started to target about a year go. I honestly don’t work on this site much, only updating it a couple times a year, but it makes use of the strategies outlined above. For several years now, every article and every tool on the site includes a “Link To This” section at the bottom of the page which pops up copy-and-paste linking code. The “link to this” section on all of the website tools generates code linking to that specific page along with text that includes the words “website tools”:

<a href=”http://www.websitegoodies.com/tools/emailguard.php” title=”E-mail Link Guard”>E-mail Link Guard</a>
- a free website tool from <a href=”http://www.websitegoodies.com”>Website Goodies</a>.

The free tools the site offers are quite popular (more than I would’ve thought when putting them together), and by making it easy for users to link to them using my text, the one-way, earned backlinks to the site from related sites have increased steadily and with them, my search ranks.