Getting Backlinks In 2009

Sometimes called inbound links, backlinks are the lifeblood of Search Engine Positioning. Inorder for a website to be on the top of search engines like Google without the webmaster having to pay big money for advertising, the website has to have a large number of backlinks. Backlinks are links on one website that lead back to another website.

The more established, high quality, and high Page Rank the website that contains the link is, the more power it has to help the linked website with its search engine position. If the website that is getting backlinks gets many High Quality and High Page Rank backlinks, the better the chance it has of being in a high position on the Search Engines.

In order to get backlinks, many people suggest submitting articles, posting on forums, and making comments on blogs. These are all great ways to get backlinks. However, there are several myths about backlinks that many people believe are true and these myths affect their backlink campaigns and what they do in order to get great backlinks for their websites. Many people reject great backlinks because of these myths.

The first and most prevalent myth about backlinks is that having a link on an “inner page” which has a low or 0 Page Rank inside of a High PR domain will do you no good at all. This is a fallacy. Here is what a friend of mine told me that his friend, who works for Google, has to say about the issue:

I can’t say much without violating my NDC, but I can definitely say this: the PR of a site is always 0 at creation, but at the next PR update (which is supposed tohappen every 3 months, but we’re a bit behind right now), the PR of something like a comment page will usually update to some portion of the PR of the main site. So if you put your site in a link from a PR8 government site, it’ll look like PR 0 for a while, but when it updates to PR 3 or 4,it will become a much more powerful backlink. Of course, for extremely large sites, like example of  Warrior Forum, the PR of the main page is spread so thin that the comment page will still only have a PR 0 –but then, for sites that large and that popular, there are other factors at play that I can’t go into that still make the backlink strong even at PR 0.

When Google’s Matt Cutts was asked about this, he refused a direct answer because he said the question cut too close to Google’s algorithm:

Stephan Spencer: OK. So, I guess, a follow on to that would be: a .edu and .gov link, and so forth, has, typically, a more pristine link neighborhood, so it is not just about the

PageRank, right? The link neighborhood comes into play.

Matt Cutts: That is a little bit of a “secret sauce” question, so I am not going to go into how much we do trust that sort of stuff.

Stephan Spencer: OK. I am going to slap my wrist now. Ouch, ouch!

Matt Cutts: [laughing]

Another myth about backlinks is that you must have only “relevant” backlinks to your website or they won’t count. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sure, it’s good to have relevant links and Google recommends it, but links that are not “relevant” also count. The Drudge Report was put on the “map” the day he broke the news that President Clinton was having an…er, indiscretion with a young intern named Monica Lewinsky. Thousands (maybe even hundreds of thousands) of sites linked to him that day. Many of them were not in his “niche”.

The other day I challenged my friend soccer fan site that I could get him on Page One of Google for his keywords. He was at the bottom of Page 6. I did his links one night and then went to bed. The next day I got up and checked and he was number one in Google for all his keywords. Not one of the sites I added his link to was “relevant” for his fan site keywords or even soccer fan sites. Yet they still worked that well that fast. If you leave out great sites because they are not “relevant” to your niche, you are leaving a lot of potential money on the table.

Another myth that many marketers worry about with backlinks is that you will be penalized for “building your links too fast”. As far as being penalized if you build links too fast, you’d have to have hundreds of thousands of the same kind of links to have that happen.

“Natural Linkbuilding” happens every day. How many links do you think I’d get today if I posted some sort of breaking news about the new US President Barak Obama on my website? What if I knew something about his background that no one else knew?

I guarantee you, I’d get thousands. Back to The Drudge Report, this site was “put on the map” the day he broke the news that President Clinton was having the indiscretion with Monica Lewinsky. Not only did hundreds of thousands of other sites link back to him that day, but many of them were not in the same niche.

This is natural and expected by Google. What is not natural is building thousands and thousands of links all in the same niche in one day. Then, you might be penalized by Google. But unless you are doing that, you have nothing to worry about. Knowing that all of these are myths makes link building a whole lot easier and enjoyable for webmasters.

Google’s algorithm is set up to reward “natural” linkbuilding and if people stay away from any site because all they can get is an “inner page” backlink, or reject sites because they are not in the same niche, or build their backlinks super slowly to avoid “red flags”, then they are actually creating a situation in which they could actually attract more negative notice by Google than if they simply worked at building their backlinks by using great websites that are available to them.

Tagged with: Backlinks In 2009 • inbound links • search engine position • search engine positioning

Filed under: Seo Money Tips

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