What type of backlinks should we be building?

I read a lot of blogs, I have to, just to keep up with trends in the industry! There’s a well known saying, “Knowledge is Power!” and it certainly rings true regarding internet marketing and search engine optimisation. The big search engines are constantly updating their algorithums and keeping up with every update or new patent is time consuming for anyone. Thats why I rely on other peoples blogs to keep me informed.

One of my favourite blogs to keep an eye on search engine patents filed is Bill Slawski’s SEOByTheSea.com. The reason I like Bill’s blog so much is that he goes into so much depth regarding patents filed by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

GooglePatents08With so much information out there regarding how google ranks websites and serves up search queries, like chinese whispers, sometimes misinformation can be put out there or vital information can be completely omitted. It is therefore good practise to go back and look at the original patents filled and go back to basics.

Today was one of those back to basics days, so I was viewing Bills Google patent’s page. The google patent I decided to focus on was :

The abstract definition for this patent is:

A search engine for searching a corpus improves the relevancy of the results by refining a standard relevancy score based on the interconnectivity of the initially returned set of documents. The search engine obtains an initial set of relevant documents by matching a user’s search terms to an index of a corpus. A re-ranking component in the search engine then refines the initially returned document rankings so that documents that are frequently cited in the initial set of relevant documents are preferred over documents that are less frequently cited within the initial set.

Now everybody knows we should be building links from relevant or related sites. To give an example from Brian Johnson’s Halloween Costume site from this post, he had built links from a Halloween Cat site. Are these links going to be beneficial for ranking purposes? The answer is yes, they are related themes. Are they possibly the best links he could have obtained? Probably not, because although related I highly doubt that a Halloween Cat site would rank for the term “Halloween Costume” due to the level of compeition for this keyword term. If you look at the abstract definition for the google patent above to see what happens:

  1. Initial Query
  2. Google locates suitable websites for the query
  3. Google then reranks these websites based on links from these sites to other sites within this subset of results.

So there you have it. When we’re looking to rank for certain terms, we should be looking for links from websites that already rank for these terms.

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6 Comments For This Post

  1. ParthaNo Gravatar Says:

    Hey Leo,

    Can you tell me if there is any website that allows you to place a link in it, when it ranks for a search term(irrespective of the categories & when keyword phrases are used)?

    Even after you search for a long time you might not be able to get couple of websites! Then how can you justify in this case?

    Thanks.

  2. LeoNo Gravatar Says:

    Hi Partha

    Thanks for the comment. No matter what link building campaign you are running your not going to get 100% conversion. So in answer to your question, as I stated the best links to get are from websites that already rank for the key term your trying to optimise for. It’s not going to be easy to get those links, you’ll have to build a relationship with the webmaster and earn the link. Some links you may never get and it’s up to you to decide how much effort a link is worth to obtain.

    hope that helps

    Leo

  3. Lee Ka HoongNo Gravatar Says:

    Perhaps I should agree with you about the statement you listed above “we should be looking for links from websites that already rank for these terms”. In fact, I’ve also got a link from the 1st ranking blog that optimized for the same keyword as mine.

    But no matter where the links you get from, as long as the blog that links to you has relevant content with yours, then it will be great.

    Regards,
    Lee

  4. LeoNo Gravatar Says:

    I agree Lee, links from related sites work very well but links from sites already ranking for the term you want are even better :)

  5. children's businessNo Gravatar Says:

    “When we’re looking to rank for certain terms, we should be looking for links from websites that already rank for these terms.”

    But surely the sites that rank for your chosen search term will be your competitors – why would they link to you?

    I can see the logic in your fancy dress example but taking the idea to its logical conclusion – does Tesco suffer because Sainsbury’s don’t link to them?

    (interesting that sainsbury’s outrank tesco for ‘groceries’ – would have bet against that one :) )

  6. LeoNo Gravatar Says:

    It’s through it’s very hard to get links from other websites that rank in the top 10 when you rank in the top but there are 1000’s of other sites that rank which mightn’t be a direct competitor. Also there are some occasions when the top performers link to each other, i.e. Google, Yahoo, etc.

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