Everything you didn’t know about Link Building and more!

Link building improves the search engine ranking of your webpage if done in specific ways. Besides improved search engine ranking, there are certain other benefits that your website derives from carrying out a link building campaign.

This article lists out other benefits of link building apart from improved search engine ranking. Link popularity is usually viewed in isolation, and most people do not realize the complete benefit of a well-defined link building campaign. While improvement in search engine rankings for specific keywords is a very important objective of link building, it is not the “only” way a link building campaign can be beneficial to a website.

What is Link Popularity Building?

Link Popularity refers to the number of links pointing to your website, from other websites on the web. Search Engines consider your site important and rank it higher if several other sites link to your site. To know the selective list of links, type in your domain name in Google, following command – Link:www.yourdomain.com. For a more extensive list, you may search the following syntax – “yourdomain.com” -site:www.yourdomain.com

For a detailed link popularity report, several back link checker tools like Moz or Ahref, are available that checks the link popularity of your site across various search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

The History behind link popularity and Google PageRank is based on hyperlinks, where sites link to other prominent sites. When hundreds or thousands of sites link to a site, it is logical to assume that such a site would be good and important.

Taking this logic further the Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page formulated a Search Engine algorithm called PageRank (named after its founder Larry Page), where the algorithm would count the number of sites that link to a page and assign it a score on a scale of 1-10. More the number of sites linking to a page, higher is its PageRank. Google’s PageRank is important because it is one of the primary off-page factors that influence your page’s ranking in the search engine result pages.

For the past few years, Google has stopped updating its PageRank value in the Google Toolbar so no webmaster can know the real value of PageRank of any page.

Benefits of Building Link Popularity

Building Link Popularity is one of the most important and critical aspects of any effective Search Engine Optimization campaign today. The ‘off-page’ factors such as link popularity, PageRank and Anchor Text in incoming links play a major role in your site’s ranking in the search engine results pages (SERP). Search Engines consider your site more important if more links point to your site. Building link popularity improves the PageRank of your web pages. Higher the PageRank value of your website, the higher its importance for search engines and higher it gets ranked in the search engine result pages. Search engines also take into account the PageRank of the pages that link to your site and its industry relevance to your own industry.

Links from higher PageRank pages and industry relevant sites give your site a higher value.

Types of Links

There are two types of links you can establish on the web:

• Only-incoming links

Only incoming links are the links established on other websites where you do not need to link back to them. Publishing articles on sites, content syndication, listing in trade directories and giving out press releases in news networks are various methods to establish one-way links.

• Link exchange 

Link exchange is an easier way to establish links from other websites. In link exchange process, you trade links with prospective partner sites by offering a link to their site from your own site. This method is a fast way to establish several hundred links to your website. However, it may not get you great benefits. Google developed the PageRank algorithm to provide authentic and quality information while making it difficult for webmasters and site owners to contaminate the search results by artificially inflating their PageRank.

As webmasters realized the importance of PageRank, they found ways to artificially inflate their PageRank by manipulating direct link exchanges. This defeated the very essence on which the Google PageRank algorithm was built. To counter this, Google has constantly been fine-tuning and updating its algorithms. In the long run, we recommend investing your resources in an ‘ only-incoming links ‘campaign for your website.

Important parameters to consider while building link popularity

Some of the important parameters that you need to consider while establishing links with any website are:

• Industry relevance in link building

Search engines give high importance to links pointing to your site from your own industry segment as opposed to those from an un-related industry. For instance, a hotels and reservations website is likely to benefit more from links pointing from a related industry site like travel, vacation packages or cruises, than those from an unrelated industry like a drug site.

• Page relevance 

Most sites offering links have several categories listed on their sites. Try and get a link from a category that closely matches your own industry. For instance, if you have a site related to hotels, then, on your partner site, a tickets site for example, try and identify a resource directory pertaining to hotels, resorts, reservations, vacation packages, travel, tourism, food and beverages etc.

If the concerned site has a directory of hotels, you should request a link in that category, as a link from that page would be relevant to a hotels site, thus getting you more benefits. An algorithm called “Applied Semantics” determines the industry relevance of a page within a site. If the link to your page is coming from your business specific segment, then you are likely to draw more benefit.

• Domain authority & page authority

In the absence of true PageRank data, it is difficult to estimate the importance of a domain in a conventional manner. However, Moz & Ahref give an estimate of the Domain Authority of any website or a web page (a score out of 100). The higher the score, the better it is to get a link from that domain or web page.

• Pre-indexed pages

Try and find link partners in search engines like Google and yahoo, and check if the links page is already indexed in the search engines. Search engines frequently re-index the pages in its database. They are likely to detect a link faster on a page already existing in their database as compared to a ‘yet-to-be indexed’ page. The safest way to check is to copy the prospective link page URL and paste them into Google search. If the page is indexed, Google would show a result in response to your search, otherwise it would respond with a ‘no result found’.

The robots.txt file robots.txt is an exclusion file that contains specific instructions for search engine robots regarding the content they are not allowed to index. Links placed on a page that the search engines robots are not allowed to index, would not benefit your site. If the robots Meta tag has no index command on the page, then the page will not be indexed.

• Dynamic link pages

Watch out for any link pages that are generated dynamically. Chances are that such pages would not get indexed soon enough, which means that a link from such a page would not benefit you.

Some dynamic link pages are intentionally generated in such a way so as to prevent them from getting indexed. Some unscrupulous webmasters do this to trick you to prevent any PageRank linking from their site to yours. Links from such pages therefore, do not give you any benefit.

• Re-directed

A link that is first re-directed to another page within your partner site before pointing to your site is a re-directed link. Search engines do not give weight to re-directed links. It is very unlikely that your site would draw any benefit from a re-directed link.

• Frame sites

Avoid getting links from framed sites as search engines cannot read texts within frames. A link placed on a framed site would not get your site any benefit, as search engines would not be able to recognize such a link.

Links from popular sites also send direct human traffic to your site. Even if links from such popular websites do not pass any link juice to you, it is worth getting links from such websites. Observing a little care in developing links will go a long way in getting your site rank high in search engines.

If you need help in ranking your website high on Google through effective link building services, please contact us.

RedAlkemi was created out of the desire to deliver measurable online success to its customer base. The founders consider themselves the alchemists who work with passion (Red) to develop processes (Alkemi) that turn a basic digital presence to a measurable and successful one, therefore the name RedAlkemi.

Yes, it’s possible! Motivated by innovation, RedAlkemists believe they can help take your business to the next level. In an ever-evolving online environment, our vision is to keep “Shaping a holistic digital presence for businesses through innovative processes.”

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