Backlinking Campaigns - Merits and Pitfalls

SEO experts are agreed that off-page optimisation is more important and on-page optimisation. Off-page optimisation is about procuring backlinks from other websites whereas on-page optimisation relates to enhancing webpages by their content and underlying coding.

Every two years SEOMoz surveys the top SEO experts in the field worldwide on their opinions of the algorithmic elements that comprise search engine rankings. They found that four of the top five ranking factors were off-page factors. Only one was an on-page factor, the keyword use anywhere in the title tag.

Interestingly, the most important factor according to these experts is the trust or authority of the host domain, viz HomePage PageRank. Only Keyword SEO Pro will analyse a list of keywords and show the top 10 positioned pages and also the corresponding HomePages and show their PageRank.

It is apparent that backlinks are advantageous and search engine optimisers and website owners are understandably keen to attract them. Consequently an SEO industry has developed based on the acquisition of backlinks either placed by individuals who undertake the task manually or by the use of programs that place that backlinks by automation.

There are three potential benefits with inbound links.

1.     Each may carry link juice and this may contribute to the PageRank of the receiving page. This is discussed in video 16 of this series.

2.     If the link is a text link, the anchor text may advise the search engines on the content of the page and it is a relevant anchor text link then this may increase the positioning of the web page for the relevant keyword.

3.     The backlink may result in some visitors swapping from the linking page to the linked page.

There are many search engines and there is fierce competition amongst them to be everybody's favourite.

They want to attract searchers because the more searchers that go onto their website the greater the chance that they will acquire finance, usually through advertisements on their search engine results pages. These are Adwords on Google. If a searcher clicks on one of these Adword links, the search engine receives money.

From the web owner's point of view, searchers have the potential of becoming visitors to their website and if it is an e-commerce website then again the website may receive additional funding.

There is a lot of money involved for search engines. These are results for Google. Their annual revenue for the year 2009 exceeded $23 trillion and their profit was over $6 billion. They employ over 21,000 people and they are keen that Google should be number one.

The search engines are keen to promote techniques that result in high-quality pages.

Such techniques are considered to be 'white hat' in SEO. Search engines are against the idea of 'black hat' techniques. They regard this as cheating. One example would be the artificial acquisition of thousands of backlinks to increase positioning of pages that are really not up to an acceptable standard. Matt Cutts, who is the head of the Department checking for spam and black hat techniques at Google, recommends that search engine optimisation should employ the Katamari philosophy.

You start with a very small item and gradually build up until your website is reaching the top.

There are numerous programs that claim to achieve increased visitor numbers by the use of their automatic backlinking programs. These are just the few of those that are available.

Over the last few months, I have been evaluating the potential benefits of a program that aims to acquire backlinks slowly and seemingly appropriately. On the positive side some of the webpages that I had been targeting keywords with relatively low keyword difficulty have improved their positioning. On the negative side, only 40 links were acquired over three months and we were advised there would be several hundred and the link juice in those 40 links amounted to zero.

The program owners correctly pointed out that some of the pages we were targeting increased their positioning quite significantly.

Here we have a web page in position 30 to 40 and with the implementation of the program, it rose to position two and eventually position one on Google.co.uk and even for Google.com. The only explanation that I have found so far is that the benefit resulting in the top positioning works through the anchor text.

The search engines have sophisticated means to find and disregard artificial link building which they considered to be black hat. If you do wish to indulge in a backlinking campaign, and every search engine optimiser in the world is doing this, you must avoid obvious anomalies:-

1.     A website with three visitors a day acquiring several hundred links in a day.

2.     Linking between websites that are hosted by the same company.

3.     Surges of backlinks. A website that acquires several hundred links one day and then nothing for a few weeks is clearly cheating.

4.     Spread the links across the web as having links on one social network only will be picked up as an anomaly.

Beware if you are clearly black hatting and particularly in a big way that the search engines may penalise you by removing your website from their index pages. Campaigns with automatic programming to acquire backlinks should proceed slowly and with caution. The aim is to steer under the search engine radars.

You should check the progress of your backlinking for the number of backlinks link juice and the anchor text. This is discussed in video 16.

Acquired backlinks with no link juice but with appropriate anchor text may increase positioning for low keyword difficulty keywords, will not increase Page Rank and they cannot achieve top 10 positioning for high keyword difficulty keywords.

Use Keyword SEO Pro to determine keyword difficulty.