Link building : The trump to higher rankings
There is a lot of buzz about link building all over the web. And the term and its significance in SEO changes on each site you dive in. The real question that most of the newbies worry about is how really important this link building is in a SEO campaign.
What if we don’t do it?
Will it prevent us from ranking well in search engines?
This list is quite long.
There is no doubt link building is an important part of SEO. However, that does not mean you will not secure good rankings if you don’t “exclusively” work on link building for your website. The reason being that, if you have good content, people will be compelled to link to your website and you will acquire links naturally without exclusively working on it.
Time to dive in.
Search engines of past
The main metric for ranking pages by Google as a search engine back at the time of its birth was the structure of hyperlinks. Google heavily banked on the structure of hypertext links to produce better search results for user’s search words. You may want to read the paper presented by Google founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. The paper presents the prototype of Google search engine.
Here is a chunk :
“There is quite a bit of recent optimism that the use of more hypertextual information can help improve search and other applications . In particular, link structure and link text provide a lot of information for making relevance judgments and quality filtering. Google makes use of both link structure and anchor text.”
It happened a few years back. How many of your remember typing “miserable failure” in the Google’s search box, hitting that “I’m feeling lucky” button and landing on the official site for the president of United States? That was Google bombing. Courtesy : Thousands of inbound links that were posted over large number of blogs and forums with the keyword “miserable failure”, pointing to the official site of the president. Hitting the “I’m feeling luck button” redirects you to the first website in the search results returned by Google. This clearly pictures how important & powerful link building was to get higher on results page at that time.
Search Engines today
Today, search engines have made a lot of improvement in their search algorithms, specially Google. It strives to deliver the very best and most relevant results for user’s search words. Over the time, the metrics that Google & other search engines use for deciding the relevancy of the search results have increased in number. At present, there are more than 200 factors that Google uses to decide relevancy and quality of search results (web pages) for a keyword. Link building, is one of them. But how important and effective is it today? Lets take a look at an example.
Visit www.google.com and type “yahoo search” (without quotes) and hit the search button.
Observations :
1. The first result is yahoo search engine.
2. That first page has a PageRank (a Google Metric) of 8.
3. The content on the page is less than 100 words.
Now the other one.
Visit www.search.yahoo.com and type “google” (without quotes) and hit the search button.
Observations :
1. The first result is google search engine.
2. That first page has a PageRank (a Google Metric) of 10.
3. The content on the page is less than 100 words.
The comparison
A key thing missing from the pages of both the search engines is “content”. This missing content means that the pages don’t require most of the on-page optimization techniques like those related with keywords, meta tags, h1 tags and many others.
Further, if you take a look at the inbound links of the home pages of Google and Yahoo Search, you will observe that both have such a large volume of inbound links. Now that makes me think how important linking can be. With almost no content, an no optimization for many other metrics that a search engine (specially Google) considers, those two pages are the top of the SERPs.
Search Engines of tommrorrow
Now this is the part most of you must be curious about. Well, there is good news. Link building is going to be an important part of SEO, at least for a foreseeable future. The reason being that hyper links are still the basic connection between two web pages. Now unless http is replace by some other protocol that will displace the hyper links, it seems link building will remain a key component of SEO.
You may find this article by Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans where they have echoed similar thoughts about link building useful. And don’t forget to read their 101 link building tips.
Happy linking !