Backlink Theory: Building Links From The Ground Up
Posted by Michael Martinez on July 11, 2007 in Link Theory
Would you build a house without laying a good foundation? Most people don’t know how to build houses but they have learned through the years that some sort of foundation is required. In fact, you need a foundation for every building. And we have transferred the idea of starting with a foundation to every type of structural concept we use.
Do you bake cakes? What is the foundation of your cake recipe, if not flour?
Do you assemble computers? What is the foundation of your machine, if not the CPU?
You build up from the foundation and in Web marketing it’s the same thing. Many companies and entrepreneurs have come to me through the years and said, “I’m launching a Web site and I want to be sure it’s well promoted before it goes live.”
That is a total non sequitur. You cannot promote a non-existent Web site. That’s like giving out a fake address and asking people to come by for a party on Saturday night. How will you persuade them to come back when you finally have an existing address?
Where links are concerned, your foundation is still your Web site. You have to link to yourself if you want other people to link to you. That’s a principle from Web design 101. Web marketing 101 explains that you have to announce your Web site (give out the URL). That doesn’t mean visit as many forums, mailing lists, and blogs as you can and leave a link.
You live and communicate in a world filled with search engines and robots. All the links you need to announce your Web site — as far as Search Engine Optimization is concerned — exist on your own Web site. You don’t need to badger other people, beg, borrow, or buy links.
That’s the best kept secret in SEO.
TrustRank Algorithm Google
People keep searching for “TrustRank Algorithm Google”. Hate to break it to you, dudes, but there ain’t no trustrank algorithm Google. Yahoo! and Stanford University invented the TrustRank Algorithm, not Google. And TrustRank doesn’t work anyway so it’s highly unlikely that anyone is using it.
But let’s talk about trust.
Trust equals links, links equal trust
Trust begins at home. Amazingly, a lot of people think they should block robots out of their “About Us” and “Contact Us” pages, and that they should use rel=’nofollow’ on internal links in order to conserve PageRank.
Of course, you cannot conserve PageRank, but you can build trust.
Search engines will follow your internal links even if they won’t show your pages in their indexes. If you can persuade a search engine to include your pages in its index, the last thing you want to do is tell search engines not to trust your pages. The most commonly cited reason people give for not wanting their “About Us” and “Contact Us” pages to appear in search results is that these are often the pages that rank first for company names.
Now, why would you think that should be? Maybe it’s because you use link anchor text like “About My Company Name” and “Contact My Company Name” in your navigation but you only use “Home” to point back to your root URL. In fact, “Home” is the most heavily optimized word on the World Wide Web because most Web sites use it in their internal link anchor text.
If you know enough about search engines to believe you need to build backlinks with good anchor text, you need to understand that you give yourself your first and best backlinks and anchor text through your on-site navigation. Sadly, many people just never seem to grasp that fact.
The chief difference between internal links and external links is that search engines are more likely to trust your internal links than they are to trust other people’s links pointing toward your pages. Why is that? Because you’re less likely to lie about your own content.
Which doesn’t mean people haven’t tried to lie about their content. They do it all the time. But internal link anchor text is usually the most honest — and most naive — portion of a Web site. Now, before you change all your “Home” links to “SEO” or “Britney Spears”, keep in mind that deceiving your visitors is not a smart idea.
What you need to do is design your internal navigation anchor text so that it agrees with your titles, Hx headers, and keyword-rich page URLs. But your link building isn’t finished.
Good Internal Link Structure
The average SEO knows you need good internal link structure. However, most SEOs assume that means navigational links. Some SEOs think that means embedded HTML navigation links. It takes an exceptional SEO to realize that internal navigation doesn’t have to come in the margin.
What do Stuntdubl and Jim Boykin know that the rest of the SEO blogging world has failed to grasp? Maybe it’s that recapping old posts on their blogs helps get those posts recrawled.
Hm. If your blog has old, Supplemental posts but the homepage is still in the Main Web Index, can you persuade Googlebot to check out the past by linking to your own posts? What a radical concept.
What works on blogs, works on static sites
Through the years I have often advised ecommerce site operators to sprinkle “featured product” links throughout their on-site copy. Few of them have followed my advice. So maybe I’m not as persuasive as I would like to be, but those ecommerce sites that make it easy for spiders to find the great product pages do tend to perform better in the search engines.
If you’re not operating an eCommerce site, but just have a hoary old business brochure site, you can spice it up by adding content on a regular basis. Blogs are popular but many people feel intimidated. Videos, white papers, tip archives, customer feedback pages, customer testimonial pages (posted with the customers’ permission), reprints of news articles about the business, press releases, event announcements, event reports — all these types of pages that appear on many small and large business sites offer opportunities for linking.
You should link liberally and link often. Instead of whining about a lack of trusted sites to get links from, you should be adding content pages to your site with more links embedded in your content. I once knew a handyman who could make the history of screws sound interesting. He should have blogged about them.
It doesn’t matter what your business is. If you breathe in the morning and fall out of your car, you have something you can say on your business Web site. Invite your employees to devote one paid day per month to a charitable activity, as long as they give you a written report with pictures. Video is better. You’ve got fresh content every month that is unique to your business.
Linking begins at home. It should be continuous at home. It should never end at home.
You’ll never have better control over links than you’ll have over the links you place on your own pages. If you own a well drilling company and you dig the holes yourself, stop agonizing over the fact that you only got a B+ in High School English. Most professional bloggers don’t know half as much about the topics they write on as you do about the tools you dig with, the job sites you have worked on, and what you have to do when the weather turns bad. You can make your site interesting regardless of whether you have typos and grammatical errors. You dig wells for crying out loud; you’re not a professional copywriter. No one cares how you write. Just tell them something interesting and embed links to relevant portions of your Web site.
Authority links don’t exist — unless you create them
Ever read an SEO blog or forum where some SEO idiot babbles on about “authority links” and “authority sites”? I know I have. I gag every time I see that tripe. What is an “authority site”? It has nothing to do with how many links point to the site. The only honest definition of an authority (as far as Web sites are concerned) is that it provides useful information.
Authority matters more to people than it does to search engines. Forget that search engines exist. Can you write more authoritatively about well digging than me? I don’t do it. I don’t know what the tools are. I don’t know what the perils are. I can go browse an encyclopedia and find sites where people mention digging a well but I don’t know the first thing about it.
By the way — if anyone knows whether there are government granst for digging wells, the lady in that last link would like to know.
Anyway, you may have competitors who know as much about putting bits into drills as you do but there are guys like me who will drop by to read about how you want to use a BlackHammer 450 Drill with 5-inch bores on a cloudy day because we just happen to be stuck digging wells on our grandfathers’ ranches. Stranger things have happened.
So create that content but also use it to link to your other content. Before you start agonizing over where you’re going to get free PR 9 backlinks that solve all your search engine problems, do yourself a favor and reduce those problems by linking to your own content from your own content. Stop obsessing over PageRank.
Backlinks have nothing to do with PageRank. Do you understand why?
Backlinks are not external to your site, they are external to your document. Do you understand the value in your own links?
Would you link to your “Contact My Company Name” page with the anchor text of “Britney Spears”? If not, then why are you even considering swapping links with another site? You might as well be linking to your home page with anchor text of “I am so stupid I don’t know what I am doing”.
Remember, when you are studying backlinks, you need to understand why backlinks are made. Why do you place links in your content? There should be only one reason: To tell someone out there about other content.
Understanding why you link to your own content, how you link to your content, and what your own links mean to your site in search engine optimization will put you miles down the road toward understanding how to build a great backlink profile.
Remember that what you learn from your own links will tell you volumes about other people’s links. You won’t be so easily impressed by “numbers of backlinks” as you become more comfortable with what links really mean.
Read more articles in this series:
Feedburner SmartFeed
- Link Flow Analysis - How to do Link Flow Analysis
- September 2008 Real Search Market Share per Quantcast
- September Quantcast report taken offline
- Keyword Ideas - How to use server logs for keyword ideas
- Palindromic SEO makes SEO palindromic
- Redefining Microcontent for Search Engine Optimization
- Yahoo! Site Explorer - A review of Yahoo! Site Explorer
- Vote or Don’t Vote
- The self-defeating pursuit of dofollow blogs
- The Link Paradox and other paradoxes of link building
4 Comments on Backlink Theory: Building Links From The Ground Up
By dodito on July 11, 2007 at 9:47 am
I presume there is a difference then (based on the “why the link”) in how a search engine will value my own link to my own content. Whethere sidewide, top menu, in footer or occasionally within a text (similar to what wikipedia does e.g.: the first time a word occurs it’s linked to that page).
Can I make any assumptions about this: e.g. within the text more relevant than in footer but perhaps less relevant than in top menu ?
Are there some general rules of thumb for this.. or is it really about.. trying it, see what happens and try again ?
By Michael Martinez on July 11, 2007 at 4:54 pm
You have to be careful about making assumptions. It is better to perform some tests.
Let’s look at Google and Ask. Google divides the Web into two indexes. They fully parse the Main Web Index but only partially parse the Supplemental Web Index. Links in Supplemental Pages don’t pass value — if your Supplemental Pages link out to other sites, those other sites won’t receive any anchor text (and probably don’t receive any PageRank).
But Google will still follow your internal links and add your internal pages to the Supplemental Index. They’ll also follow your outbound links and add those pages to the Supplemental Index. So your internal links work no differently from your outbound links.
On the other hand, if you have a page in the Main Web Index, you may be able to link from it to your other pages and get at least some of them into the Main Web Index. Matt Cutts put it this way: “You get so much (Internal) PageRank to spread across your pages. The more PageRank you have, the more pages you get into the Main Web Index.”
Of course, you have to have good internal linkage. In practice most business sites are small enough that only a few inbound links (that pass Internal PageRank) are needed to get them into the Main Web Index.
Ask, on the other hand, will parse your site into topics. It uses a mix of on-page factors and internal navigational links to figure out how many of your pages are more relevant to Topic A and how many are more relevant to Topic B. It’s kind of cool to see that they can analyze a site structure so well. But that depends a lot on your internal linkage.
On the other hand, your internal links may not be sufficient to help your pages rank well on Ask for those specific topics. You may still need topic-relevant links from other pages that Ask has qualified for those topics.
So those are two examples of how search engines may distinguish between internal links and external links. But you should be careful not to read too much into those examples. They only illustrate possibilities, not definitive rules. The search engines have very sophisticated algorithms.
By dodito on July 11, 2007 at 8:25 pm
Thank you very much for this extensive reply. We have been building an online library (full text, text html well mostly) so the total site is already 20.000-25.000 pages large. Ofcourse exactly as you say most in supplemental, some not for the internal and some external linking. So our next task is.. to add the hubpages, mix them with the other content we have.. and bring balance through internal linking.
If you’re interested I’ll let you know if we come across something that is interesting.
I can tell you one thing though.. nofollow tags are not that nofollow. It really depends who gave the link the nofollow tag. These links may not give you PR or anchor text (but frankly I do not know this because I have not had the time to test all this), but it does not necessarily influence your ranking poorly. Or rather I can say from experience that certain nofollowed links definitely have had a positive impact on google. (and since we have only a few external links yet, I can be 80-90 % sure when a link has impact and which one it was). Oh… and I am not talking long tail either, and neither am I talking about being able to get into the top 10.. but for a pretty competitive 2 keyword sets, it can help your home page get from not listed at all (not even supplemental) to top 200.
By dodito on July 11, 2007 at 8:28 pm
After we restructure our site.. I’ll check out Ask.. I am quite curious how well they can disect a site.. well our site.
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