What is Backlinking?If you have built a website and have done any form of search engine optimizing, then you are no stranger to back linking strategies. It's one of two key ingredients that we all have control over to help our website improve in search engine rankings. The on-page SEO that we all do includes getting our title, meta description, meta tags, and internal linking in order is the first. There's only so much you can do short of spamming your articles with your keywords.
The off-page SEO work requires popular sites like eZinearticles, Squidoo and even this site to link back to your site. When Google index these pages and follows the link back to your site, then you get a boy scout or girls scout badge that says you are an authority site and lots of people like you. You want sites that are also of higher authority. Just do a PR check to see what the PR number is.
So the logic is to get as many HIGH ranking site to link back to your site. Most use article sites to include a link to our website in the signature. The question is how many articles and how many of these high PR sites will you need to please to get your links on there? The formula varies and there are many factors to consider which is beyond the scope of this article.
For the impatient, what I have seen is that people are hiring companies and services that create links from websites all over the world. Most of the time these links have nothing to do with nor are they remotely related to the content they are linking back to. The results are thousands of links that get generate back to the site and the search engines are accepting these links despite what the gurus are saying. Are the search engine only applying the new rules to new sites while grandfathering existing sites in their database? I don't have that answer and only the search engine engineers can answer that question. What I do know is that it still works.
How do I know it works?
You don't have to take my words for it. Do your own due diligence. Go to Google and search for a popular topic like "make money online". There are two kinds of sites that will show up on the top of the list: sites that have been building their authority over the year and sites that seem to pop up overnight. You will probably see a YouTube video on top of the list. Checkout the publish date. Then go to AHREFS website and do a back link search. Click on the number of links and see what the back link reports show.
As you can see, there are many links of gibberish and some maybe in foreign language. Again, there are legitimate sites that have been building their brand and presence over the YEARS and I am all for that. What I am talking about are sites that, within months and sometime days, seem to exponentially get back links out of nowhere. Does this seem fair to you?
Why am I writing about this?
So why am I telling you this? I and many internet marketers out there have been told over and over that:
micro niche sites are not ranking anymore (I beg to differ: just Google "baton rouge architects")
authority sites are they way to go
buying links to your site does not work
and on..and on...and on
Like a nun at a prep school telling you if you do it, we'll get a ruler out and slap your hand!
Should you blindly listen to the masses out there?
So where is Sheriff Google, Sheriff Bing or Sheriff Yahoo? Who's minding the internet?
It's seems to me that as internet users becomes more reliant on search engines to guide them and direct them through the internet, we, as internet marketers, are slaves to these search engines. But do we have to mindlessly obey their "laws"? What is fair is what is not?
I know I have more questions than answers, but I hope there's a defining answer out there. I will be searching for it.
If I'm wrong, please correct me. If you have a different perspective base on facts and not hearsay, I'd like to hear about it.
