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A while back I did a post on what I considered to be the very basics of local small business website marketing. Since it seems the basics were appreciated, I decided to do a post on another basic I’m questioned about a lot… why a site needs links to rank (oh, I’m dead serious).
This post isn’t aimed at professional webmasters or search marketers. This is aimed at the person new to search engine optimization that needs a basic understanding of why they need to develop links, though professionals may find it useful for the new link developer or search marketing trainee.
It’s derived from a presentation I did to small business owners last year and I thought others may find it useful. I’m a strong believer that link developers need to know why they are developing links to be successful. And special thanks to the title tag whore for coming up with the monkey reference in the title.
With that in mind…
Long ago a search engine called Alta Vista ruled the net, Yahoo was a hand picked list of websites and Google was something that babies did. In the shadows, a few website owners were giving birth to what would later be called search engine optimization.
Strategies to be seen in Alta Vista would now be considered the simplest of simple. Put the words you want to rank for in the meta tags, on the page and in your title tag. Sit around, wait and cash the checks.
As search engines increased in competition and matured, it became clear that they needed to add more factors to decide which sites should be ranked the best for which terms.
Enter links…
A link refers to a hyperlink from one webpage to another. When you click a link on one webpage, it takes you to another webpage, either on the same website or a different one. Search engines realized that good websites often had a lot of other sites linking to them and got an idea. And that idea was link popularity.
The more links a site had, the more popular is was conceived to be by the search engines and the better they ranked it as a result.
Imagine the two pictures above represented links on the Internet for two different websites… which site would you think is more popular? Get it? Good. You now understand link popularity.
But, by this point, Google had become heavy on the scene and they quickly discovered that not all links are created equal.
Enter pagerank…
To understand pagerank, we must go to the expert authority on judging the value of others with viscous scrutiny based upon their perceived value and social standing…
Welcome to high school (I know I just felt waves of Internet geeks cringe).
Pagerank basically was a measure of how important your website was based on what other types of websites were linking to you. To use the high school analogy… if the AV club thought you were cool, it didn’t carry anywhere near as much weight as the prom queen thinking you were cool.
The more popular kids (higher pagerank websites) you could get to say you were cool (link to your website), the cooler you actually became on the high school social scale (the better you ranked).
Pagerank was a brilliant concept. Pagerank allowed for quality to outrank quantity – but quantity still worked and well.
In addition to the standard webmasters figuring out to make pagerank work towards their advantage (since Google publicly published a website’s pagerank via their toolbar), inventive search engine marketers figured out they could create programs to automatically obtain some of the “easier” links - guestbooks, forums and blogs – in mass quantities.
The sheer quantity of the links they could obtain overnight via these methods were able to power their websites above those with smaller amounts of quality incoming links. The age of hardcore search engine spam had been born.
Link development and search engine optimization were booming. As a result, search engine optimizers got more and more sophisticated and as a result, both link popularity and pagerank had been deciphered and manipulated. Automated link spam (the term used for sites obtaining links via the automated programs) was at an all time high. Google realized it needed to add something to the link analysis recipe.
Enter trustrank…
Trustrank confused most webmasters when it first came into play. The addition of trustrank had a side effect that was dubbed as the sandbox effect early on. The existence of the sandbox was a huge debate in the various search engine optimization communities. Some webmasters didn’t see the effects of it, while most did. As the sandbox became more understood as a side effect of not having the needed “trust”, many adaptable search engine marketers and webmasters became more adept at escaping it very quickly.
The exact components of trustrank are still debatable. But the bottom line is that websites needed more than links and pagerank to survive. They needed to exude quality indicators and get links from “trusted” websites (and allow those links to age like wines).
Now you understand why you need links to rank. Learning how to get those links is best done by some heavy reading at various resources on link development.
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Explaining Google rank via high school popularity? Brilliant. You nailed it with a perfect metaphor.
I was an anomaly in high school, being rather popular despite being one of the goth freaks hanging out in art class during lunch breaks… For some reason I was known and admired in the preppy crowd and got voted onto school council. Maybe it was that “Robert Smith” thing I had going on with my hair. Or because I played in a band that did gigs in Toronto clubs and I had this sullen mysterious weltchmertz thing that was so hot in the 1980s. Or was it the eyeliner?
I owe some of my high school popularity to my older brother, who was immersed in the “in” crowd and I sort of inherited some of that via people making that connection.
So, I was this boy who had really good content, lots of spammy popularity from low-quality people and a few links from trusted units.
How did I rank? somewhere near the top of page two
Rae — thanks for this post. The more I know and read, the more I realize how much I miss in all the noise. This was a really good reference with excellent links.
Excellent article Rae. Definitely deserves a Digg.
This is an excellent and concise internet and SEO history as well as link building how to.
Page Rank > Rage Punk > The never ending story..
Trust Rank > Rust Tank > The kids got a new toy..
Wooww, Sugar, great articles, I have been reading your Blog for a couple days now, they’re just amazing. I came from Jim Boykin’s Blog to the page with the link building interviews and now I land here, I will never stop reading your blog. Thanks for all the great information.
Here are some link-building strategies I have employed successfully for increasing the popularity of my own sites:
1. Pay for traffic. I know, it’s not an option for most of us but it dos work. PPC is expensive when you know what you are doing; if you don’t know what you’re doing it’s probably like working the slot machines in Las Vegas.
2. Write great content. Google loves sites that provide quality content that visitors actually read. Become a respected authority in your niche and other sites will link to you naturally.
3. Distribute articles to article submission sites. Have a few 600-1000 word articles professionally written and inlude links to your site in the “About the Author” byline. You’ll be surprised how many other webmasters will publish these articles on their site.
4. Exchange links with relevant sites in your niche. Yes, exchanging links still works. But these have to be in-content links, not links from some “partner directory” or “resource directory” hidden in the depth of your site.
5. Provide link bait. Offer a free e-book or software that includes a link back to your site.
So get started if you want to dredge your website out of the web’s nowhere land.
A perfect concise history of SEO and incisive look on link building. Rather than be messed up by link building, it’s good to know why you should. The reason as to why I would decide to follow that link, I think, you should address this first. Excellent work though, puts a webmaster and a novice almost on the same footing!
Great post, but I’m surprised there’s no mention of anchor text. That’s something I always have to educate the client on the importance of. It also helps to get webmasters to start thinking of targeting a unique keyword per page.
As you have mentioned in the post that every one need huge number of back links to survive, so people are now busy in getting back link pointing to their web site. Many of them are using an automated system of spamming to get back links.
But is there any other way to get back links? If you want to build back link ethically, it will take hell of time. There are so many restrictions on link building and biggest of them is the search engine product the “nofollow” tag. Apart from it web masters are also don’t want to participate in the community. If you send 100 requests to web master regarding the link exchange, you will hardly get a reply.