Sonet Journal

Blog Links Good or Bad?

Saturday, July 15th, 2006

Reading Jim Boynkin’s Internet Marketing Blog this evening I came across a post about the future of text link building here >> where he had cited some interesting points from a post by Abhilash titled: “Future of Text Link Building” a few good points were raised one of them being:

‘Blog Links may get discounted, but Editorial Blog Links will be money’

I think for the most part blog links are being discounted but then again, it depends where the blog link is coming from. IMO if you have a site with some real great content or a good article and relative content blogs links incoming from a discussion or editorial, it is going to help.

I believe the usual sidebar links of blogs linking to about anything does not help much anymore. This tells me that ‘link-hunting’ or ‘buying links’ should be based around more in requesting that they are surrounded with text. Yes, I know I am stating the obvious but the point here is that not many are following this principle. I know one of the biggest problems I was having when looking for links is finding people who would link from a body of text rather than just the sidebar or from a links page. It’s almost blasphemy to ask someone “how about a link from that great posts of yours bang right in the middle to a page of mine”. I have refined it better now and don’t have as much problems as I used to have with doing this.

You see it’s all really simple, an algorithm such as Google’s that bases itself on ranking websites according to the quality of backlinks (just one it’s factors) will look to see if a websites links are coming in naturally. Obviously, if they are from a page that is full of links, or in a blog’s case all on the sidebar then it is going to give less weight to the site. I can never understand when I read forums with SEO’s and webmasters up-in-arms because their sites have dropped from the coveted number one spots to page twenty or disappeared entirely. On further analysis of their sites it always transpires that they have hundreds of non-relevant links or just too many IBL’s from link pages and none from content pages or blog editorials. No matter how much you point this out or how many posts are written about this, they don’t or won’t listen.

Good well written content is great link bait. Sites always need content or they are always willing to link to articles as it’s a discussion point and it gives them something to talk about. Furthermore, it is easer to justify a large amount of links to your article than hundreds of inbound links to a page that sells Teflon pans.

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Related Reading
Link Building Basics
Future of SEO

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 15th, 2006 at 7:31 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Blog Links Good or Bad?”

1. Abhilash Says:
   July 16th, 2006 at 12:41 am

   Nice post. You’re right on here. Contextual links from within main body content are what I was referring to as “editorial”. In the language of web referencing, that’s the quintessential definition by a 3rd party of another webpage & it’s subject matter.

   The fact that “not many are following this principle” is testament to your conscientiousness & an indicator that you’re better than most people Granted, it’s always temporary and we must stay ahead of the curve, but now that you’ve refined your methods, it just goes up from here!

   Keep up the great work.

2. Vinnie Says:
   July 16th, 2006 at 2:00 am

   Thanks Abhilash for confirming this. It\’s interesting this post has come right in the middle of an update by Google. I was taken by surprise when I noticed some changes this afternoon (GMT). Looking at my company website, I noticed it had retained its PR and kept its position but dropped in the amount of back-links that Google was divulging publicly. Now, I am seriously trying to get my head around this. Looking at the BL\’s that Google have allowed they are \’not much to write home about\’ except for a few. The ones Google are not counting publicly are some of the more important ones that come from articles and are exactly as described in my post above.
   Why is Google doing this? Is it not to let other SEO\’s or webmasters hunting for links to know where a site gets theirs? Or am I just plain wrong about everything and those great informative on-topic article links worth nothing at all? I think the former could be more the truth of the matter.

   Now here is something that I got slightly confused with. While Google announced earlier in the year it had changed it\’s algorithm for the better and it was getting good at ranking sites with more natural links from authority sources. I couldn’t help notice today that some sites were going up in PR and had thousands of obviously \’bought-in\’ links.

   What does this tell us? I won\’t be fully sure - until the update has completed, this could take a couple of days yet. As of writing this and from the view I have, it appears:

   1. It is still counting links en masse when updating Page Rank feature.

   2. I may well-off-the-mark here, but it is possibly looking at the age factor of individual pages.
   I say this because a page I know off - searchandgo.com/geo/ - has a ton of backlinks going into the thousands, none of them paid for,  all of them natural because of the service and the small freeware application it has on its page. This page still remained at PR5 which should have expected to go higher.

   3. Content still counts for everything. Checking a directory that has articles surrounding each category I noticed the PR had gone up.

   4. PR not accounting for anything anymore - only a slight indication of the on-topic backlinks a website has. You can still rank with a few really good relative links. Yes, ‘relativity is now crowned Emperor’.

   This may all change tomorrow and I\’ll be eating my hat…

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