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How linking addition destroys your SEO life

Posted by Michael Martinez on May 11, 2007 in Link Theory

It’s not all about links.

Fortunately for a few of us, most people in the search optimizing industry haven’t figured out the truth. It’s about links and content, but the vast majority of people focus their search optimization efforts on link building, thus wasting most of their time and effort.

You’ll still see a lot of “major” SEOs in popular forums equating Google’s PageRank with link popularity. That’s just not the way PageRank works. You could have a high PageRank of .00000001 that is derved from thousands, perhaps millions of inbound links from relatively unimportant pages that hardly anyone links to, or you could have only a handful of links from pages wth higher PageRank that just don’t link out to many other pages.

PageRank is not about link popularity, nor even about link quality. If you see someone discussing PageRank in those terms, you can rest assured they don’t know what they’re talking about.

PageRank is about link value. What is the value of a link pointing toward your page?

Many hard-core linkers studitiously seek out pages with A) few outbound links and B) high Toolbar PR. The idea behind this nonsense appproach to linking is that you’ll get more PageRank from a high TBPR page that has relatively few outbound links.

Here are several reasons for why that strategy doesn’t work:

1. If that page is going to add your link when you request it, it will add other links when people request them
2. You have no way of knowing whether the link will pass value
3. The Toolbar PR values are worthless fluff that tell you nothing useful

Formulaic link-building is intended to manipulate search results through PageRank. And as anyone well-versed in SEO theory knows, PageRank does not determine search results.

I still see people talking about how to improve their rankings in forums and on blogs by getting more links. It doesn’t work that way. You improve your rankings by getting more anchor text. Given a choice between the two following links, which should you accept?

Link A: From a page with Toolbar PR of 9, you can have 1 2-word expression in the anchor text

Link B: From a page with Toolbar PR of 2, you can have 2 8-word expressions in anchor text (2 links)

The answer is always B — provided you can determine whether either page will actually pass value, of course. Toolbar PR doesn’t tell you whether a page passes value.

If you choose one link with no more than 2 words in the expression, all you get that will help your rankings is a little bit of PageRank (there are billions of pages, so even a link from a PR 9 page doesn’t help much) and 2 words of anchor text.

If you choose two links with up to 8 words in each expression, all you get that will help your rankings is a little bit of PageRank (statisically no less powerful than the PageRank you get from the PR 9 page) and up to 16 words of anchor text.

Although it’s stupid for search engines to pass anchor text from one page to another in their databases, you might as well optimize your linking structures and go for as much anchor text as you can get. Remember that you’re not just optimizing for “real estate”, “poker”, “travel arrangements”, “vacations”, “ring tones”, and “airport parking”. You’re also optimizing for “great real estate deals in cancun”, “how to win at poker”, “how to save money on travel arrangements”, “download free ring tones without malware here”, and “where to find the best airport parking in Atlanta”.

If you can work out something reasonable, why not beat the anchor text to death: “Ring Tones Site - Download Ring Tones for free”. I stipulated 8 words of anchor text and I used “Ring Tones” twice. Now imagine two links like that.

Of course, many people wrongly believe that placing 2 or more links to the same destination on a page is wasted. Why? Because they assume that only the 1st link passes value. Well, I know a few things you don’t know about links.

Tell you what: You should apply the SEO Method (Experiment, evaluate, adjust) to see if you can learn what I have learned. Don’t make the mistake of assuming your first experiment tells you the whole picture.

You hurt your search engine optimization efforts when you value links on the basis of “High Toolbar PR + Low Outbound Links”.

You hurt your search engine optimization efforts when you value links on the basis of “Limit 1 link per page”.

You hurt your search engine optimization efforts when you value links on the basis of “limit anchor text only to primary keywords”.

You hurt your search engine optimization efforts when you value links on the basis of “the more links the better”.

If the majority of the links you get don’t pass value, they are worthless, time-wasting links. If you don’t know how to determine when a link passes value, you’re wasting your time. If you don’t know how to prequalify a page as being likely to pass value (hint: It has nothing to do with which top-level domain the page comes from), you’re wasting your time. If you don’t know how to use a small number of strategic links to get crawled, indexed, and improve your on-page optimization efforts, you’re wasting your time.

You may very well be achieving results with your linking efforts. I’ve discussed SEO with people who point thousands of links at their pages and get top 10 rankings in oh-so-competitive keywords like “some obscure industry you never heard of before”. I’ve also seen how a few savvy SEOs have parlayed their quantitative on-page optimization skills into achieving high rankings for very competitive expressions.

I’ve done it myself.

Just because every idiot on the Web says you have to have thousands of links to compete for high-value expressions doesn’t mean you actually do have to have thousands of links to compete for high-value expressions. There is only one way to know. Optimize a page until you cannot squeeze any more value into it without looking spammy and see what happens. Either the page will rank or it won’t.

If the page doesn’t rank after you optimize, then you know you need links. But given a choice between pursuing a few thouasnd links and pursuing a few dozen, which strategy would you prefer to follow?

“But how do you get those few dozen links that do the trick?” you might reasonably ask. That’s the trick, isn’t it? The $100 question is: How do I find the right links to tip the scales of value in my favor?

The answer is: It depends. We’ve gone beyond the elementary arithmetic of linking theory. Now we’re getting into quantum linking theory. Quantum linking theory holds that the value and availability of a link cannot be determined at the same time. In these terms, “availability of a link” means “the value a link passes”. You never know what the value of a link is, nor whether it is actually passing value.

Quantum linking theory is where you optimize your efficiencies. When you learn to work with unknown factors, incorporate them into your strategy, you become both more restrictive and more flexible in your link management. You learn to shed the worthless metrics that tell you nothing about the value of a link and its availability.

We haven’t come far enough down the road for me to get into the details of quantum linking theory. Not yet. But I think, given time, we’ll get there.

And in linking theory, time is a factor most people never take into consideration. Think about that. How does time affect your linking strategy? How do you accomodate time in your linking strategy?