Link baiting for seo ? What is a reciprocal link? Should I link or not?
May 10th, 2009. Published under Network Marketing. No Comments.
You have perhaps been told that getting links from other sites related to your own website genre is generally a good idea. Perhaps you have even gotten not a few email requests to this effect.
Most of us seo followers have a deep understanding of what this phrase means, but for the rest of us it simply means getting links from other sites to your own.
Pre-google, this was done by asking friends and foes to link to you, and whole communities even encouraged this but Yahoo Google and MSN soon began to devalue these reciprocal efforts due to not just the potential for spam but because a kind of very real link REAL spam that was taking place in this area.
Spam is known by some as that tasty meat from which the current swine flu propagates,lol, sorry couldn’t help myself, but in internet lingo its also known as the process whereby a few tech savvy individuals attempt to gain unfair advantage by flooding areas of the internet with their own commercial resource.
I.e. too many enterprising spammers send out unsolicited comments using software robot programs – to create thousands of backlinks automatically in forums, blogs and other places. Others created fake websites and pages with links back to their own – not the phrase “their own” – commercial products – hence the need for objective PageRank and PageTrust. In those early days, the search engines were not looking at important minutia such as which reciprocal links were owned by the same organization or which 5 linking websites were on the same machine. In order to stop those who would fill our inboxes with junk, this information is collected and analysed as it’s rather important for determining exactly who the spammers are.
It is said that successful backlinking depends very heavily on the keywords one chooses – traditionally, this has been where many back-link efforts have fallen down.
Why? Because unless you created the links yourself, you can’t determine how someone else will link to your site. And in direct contradiction to what you might be reading around the net, therein lies a big part of the problem, right?
Secondly, since as a casual reader, you are not likely to be an expert on niche market keywords, one is going to most logically try to pick the keywords having the most traffic. Would this be the correct thing to do? A very new online venture, even after being indexed by Google or most search engines, doesn’t stand a prayer for getting traffic based on the most highly trafficked keywords – sorry but this wait for traffic could extend to many months or even years.
And perhaps that’s not all one has to worry about.
But there is yet one more major problem. The page rank of new articles is N/A or after indexing, typically Zero where Zero is worst and 10 is the best. Some may say differently while a new page with N/A or O as its rank can have a freshness quotient that can help it positively, in many search engines, this zero which is evidence of lack of credibility will most likely work against it.
But there are exceptions to every rule and if the newly created page is sitting on a highly popular Web 2 social network property like kijji or facebook, bebo or scribd to name a few then it won’t be penalized as much just because its current pagerank or credibility level appears to be a zero.
As the examples of exceptions above clearly show, it is thought that new pages on foundation sites such as those with a PageTrust of 5 or above, inherently acquire some of the PageRank or PageTrust of the site that they are associated with.
Technical babble galore – the question really is – What can a novice do ?
Many seo experts might say, go back to basics, content and get creative. They would recommend strongly that we even create “link-bait” that will cause others to want to link to you.I like both this phrase and the thought if you can get this very weighty idea to lift off the ground any at all. Its never a great idea to truly ignore what Google recommends, however I urge you to examine the decision to get involved in creating link-bait more deeply. Calculate whether you really have 3-6 months that it takes to consistently create new articles on a daily basis, and to publish a huge amount of intensely likable content in one spot that would cause people to socially bookmark that page on your site – If the answer is no then you understand why most of us will never ever intentionally create link-bait.
Many more questions than answers, huh?