Google values how popular you are by seeing who you are linked to, very much like we humans do in our social networks

So when showing the Google bots how well connected you are, you want to have links to the most important of websites and you want to gain these links in a natural way. So when trying to play it cool whilst making all the right web friends it’s vital to understand how to develop a high-quality natural-looking link profile that gets you ranked for in short medium and long term, without becoming ‘over optimised’. 

Subject: Linking

Category: Off-Page

Date: May 2018

Get all the right connections 101

Quality not Quantity

Gone are the days when you could direct 100’s of links towards your website in one-time blast and you go to the top of the rankings. This worked many years ago but Google put a stop to this ‘spammy’ tactic. Now it is all about the quality and relevance of the links you build.

Over-Optimisation

Believe it or not, you can become what is known as ‘over-optimised’ this is when some lazy link building has been implemented and there are too many links pointing towards a website that appear to have a low probability of being natural in Googles’ eyes. We see this a lot, the trick to rectifying this is to actual diversify the subsequent links to dilute the aggressiveness of the current links.

Relevance, Relevance Relevance

The big ‘R’ is most SEO firms drop the ball, remember Google loves relevance, it is how it organises everything, so creating links that are too ambiguous will not help your rankings, at best it will give you some authority but Google needs to know around what subject. There are some very powerful ways to build this relevance beyond what most will tell you, but we know a whole raft of techniques that keep Google clearly signposted all the way to your offering.

Link Power

Link power refers to the amount of power that a link passes on when linked to another website. Think of like an electrical network, some websites have a low voltage with a short reach and can only power small amount of authority and others a high voltage that can have a long reach and big impact on authority.