Linkbuilding Myths Debunked
There was this interesting post in YouMoz yesterday entitled “LinkBuilding:Mislead to Believe” where the author Tripti debunked 6 linkbuilding myths that has been an area for debate in the SEO world for the last few years.
Myth #1: Outbound Links can kill your rankings
There is this belief that outbound links can diminish your PR or rankings but this is not true according to Tripti. Linking to other websites will not kill your rankings if you do it to provide value to your readers. Just imagine if you become a good resource and link people to the places they like to go in the internet. Wouldn’t your website have more value? Even if some people think that the search engine algorithms is robotic, it is not. It still looks for quality websites who care for their visitors.
Myth #2: Reciprocal links won’t work
The issue here is not the act of reciprocal linking but how the reciprocal linking is done. When some people hear about reciprocal linking, they immediately assume that they should search for people with link pages. This is wrong. Search engines do penalized people who are engaging in this link focused activity. However, if one person saw his link on your website and decided to link back then there’s nothing wrong with that. Yes it is a reciprocal link but it is done all because the sites are related and they compliment each other. As you can see, search engines do not like it when you try to game their system. So it is best to do linking in the most natural way.
Myth #3: Link with a Higher Page Rank
People have always fussed about pagerank when in reality, they should be looking on the combination of page rank and outbound links. Tripti showed this in his example:
Who says backlinks from PR 5 is better than PR 1? Look at this PR calculation formula:
PR (A) = 1 – d + d ( PR(B) / L(B) + PR(C) / L(C) + PR(D) / L(D) + ….. )
d = 0.85 (damping factor derived statistically)
The final Page Rank of your web page equals to 1-0.85 + 0.85 x (PR/ number of outbound link).
Now, for instance, you have web page A. You are getting links from two pages: one is B and other is C.
Page B (page rank- 5, number of outbound links – 100)
Page C (page rank- 1, number of outbound links – 10)
According to the formula above, if web page A gets link from page B, the final PR will be 0.15 + 0.85 x 5/100= 0.193.
And if A gets a link from C, the final PR will be approximately 0.24.
So you see, the final PR value of Page A will be better if linking with C has PR 1 than linking with a page B that has PageRank 5.
Myth #4: Link with a high PR website
Linking with a high PR website is worthless if your link is not located on a high PR page. You must learn to search high PR pages. This goes for the traditional linking methods of commenting and link building as well.
Myth #5: Permanent Link Building
Links are never permanent. You have to build it on a continuous basis and some webmasters tend to remove some links as time passes. It is therefore important to make your link building process continuous.
Myth #6: Paid Links are Unethical
In reality, there is really no difference between free and paid links except that the paid links are put in particular pages they like and it is paid. There is nothing unethical about it for they are not stepping over those who are securing free links.
It is a rather interesting read. For the whole article, visit YouMoz.
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Tags: Link building, linkbuilding
It is indeed an interesting reading and I certainly agree to what is said here. There are so many misconceptions about link building, especially when we are now talking about Web 2.0 which focuses much more on human visitor optimization factors than search engine optimization.
Most of these myths are really complicated, a lot of pro still not sure whether these idea are true or false ..
great tips, read each one
just one question, how ‘important is this? – Linking with a high PR website is worthless if your link is not located on a high PR page.
I had the idea that only the domains PR counted? Or is it to do with the individual pages…
I noticed a little bit of an issue with the calculation in Myth #3 and it boils down to the fact that the ToolBar PR is not used by Google in it’s internal page rank calculations, such as determining how much link juice will be transferred from a page.
It is fairly well accepted (SEOMoz has a page rank calculation document that I got this from) that the tool bar PR scale of 1 – 9 is not what Google uses. In fact there is some speculation that Google uses a logarithmic scale for their internal calcs. So rather than the toolbar PR 5 site having a Google PR of 5, it might have a value of 1*10 to the fifth power or 50,000, while the TBPR might correlate to a GPR of 10. If this is the case, then a TBPR 5 page would be much more valuable to get a link from than the TBPR 1 page, even if it had 10 times the number of links on it than the TBPR1 site.
Cheers,
Jim
Hi Guest,
Search engines rank and deliver search results on a page basis, not a domain or site basis. Site wide factors do matter i.e. structure for easy spidering, internal linking, etc , but when an SE serves up a query results page the links on it are intended to display the most relevant search result pages, not domains.
If you think about this for a moment, this makes perfect sense, if the SEs served up domains rather than pages, they would be forcing the searcher to do a secondary search within the site to find the information they want. MUCH better to just plop the searcher directly to the page with the most relevant information…. makes for happy searches and a search engine that mints money!
cheers,
Jim
PS – on my previous post here “the TBPR might” should have been typed as “the TBPR 1 site might”
I’ve read somewhere that reciprocal are still working, even if Google says it doesn’t…
Some very complex explanations there. I think I’ll stick to simple tried and tested methods of building backlinks.
Only Linking with a high PR website is worthless if your link is not located on a high PR page. is false.
I follow this concept and got PR6..!!!
This is 100% true concept that Linking with a high PR website is worth half the link in the main page… I researched a lot of sites and found it true.!
Good points in this article. Regarding reciprocal linking in Myth#2, I don’t think the issue is whether it works or not, but rather the weight that is given to those links versus one way backlinks. One way links should be more valuable as the website that is being linked to doesn’t receive any links in return. So, yes, they do work, but the question is of their value, and this should be looked at in terms of your total link building strategy.
I see advertising for sites that will submit your link to 50, 100, 250+ links. Are these sites a ripoff or a good deal? The cost seems reasonable.
Another myth concerning links is that they need to be surrounded by relevant content. In my experience, all that counts is the anchor text of a link. Even if there is no text surrounding the link at all, the links will still “work” well.
There are a number of good points in this article. I don’t really understand why you think that a PR 1 site would have just as valuable a backlink as a PR 5 site. that doesn’t really make sense either empirically or qualitatively. Other than that, I agree with your points.
Bob Whitehurst
Nice post, theres been a huge amount of debate over reciprocal links recently and the info on # of outbound links on a page was useful too.
Does where your data is stored affect SEO? I run a data center (consort.us.com) and I’m wondering if I websites we host can get better SEO with our help.
Thanks!
Landon
Thanks a lot for demystifying the myths of linkbuilding.
I have a question….
If I put in links on a page of my website, linking to another page on my website, will it improve the SEO?