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Google Offers Inbound Link Advice

Want links? Google says be interesting

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By · October 13, 2008 · 79 Comments

Google’s Maile Ohye concluded Link Week with a tutorial on inbound links. It says basically what SEO experts have been saying for years: content and inbound links are most important, and in that order.
Google Offers Inbound Link Advice
Just because it’s old news doesn’t mean it’s bad news. Google’s had a real history of silence on the SEO side of things, and experts were often left to theorize and test—and worse, try to game. Google sent a pretty loud signal this time last year by hitting the PageRanks of paid directories, a move seeming to confirm basic white-hat SEO tactics.

In her post, Ohye extols the virtues of naturally gained, editorial inbound links and directly denounces links appear “spammy,” or not “merit-based.”

“One of the strongest ranking factors is my site’s content. Additionally, perhaps my site is also linked from three sources — however, one inbound link is from a spammy site. As far as Google is concerned, we want only the two quality inbound links to contribute to the PageRank signal in our ranking.

"Given the user’s query, over 200 signals (including the analysis of the site’s content and inbound links as mentioned above) are applied to return the most relevant results to the user.”

Ohye then offered four bullet points on how to earn merit-based links, paraphrased below:

  • Start a site-related blog, writing or video, research or entertainment.
  •  Be interesting. Be a teacher. (Hey, that should be a recruitment slogan for a College of Education somewhere! I’ll sell it to ya for the bargain price of $500,000—if a private school, just $10,000, since as a non-government institution you can’t just print the money you need.)
  • Participate in the community surrounding your industry—social media, blog comments, user reviews.
  • Provide useful products or services.

In short: content, content, content, a little participation, and the links will come. 

 

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There are 79 Comments. Add Yours.

  1. Vey true, but nothing that hasn’t been said before. I don’t like the idea of one spammy link being too detrimental. It would be easy for a competitor to sabbotage someone elses site.

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  2. Personally I don’t think they can or do penalize too heavily for a semi-spammy link since it would be far to easy to negative-SEO your competitors.  I think it’s just that a lot of weight isn’t given to the link, but it’s still indexed. Sort of like nofollow. Sure they say they don’t follow them, but a quick query shows that to be false.

    I’m still trying to figure out why they give more "authority" to links from some sites and less to others even if they have the same topic and PR. I think that’s just one of the hidden gears of G’s algorithms.

    • Because Google looks at a lot more than just the sites that links to your sites topic and PR, they consider among many other things… amount and quality of in and outbound links, the simularity of all links, location of the link within the pages content, the anchor text and relavency to page content and the target page content…. etc ect ect. ;)  

  3. Further buttresses the point that no one can "fully" understand Google’s ranking algorithm. Personally, I think it’s a good idea to focus more on content though as i have seen a PR2 page outrank a PR5 page for most of the related keywords. Content is still King

    I can’t help wondering why googlebot follows links on pages with the nofollow attribute.

    • The nofollow attribute value is not meant for blocking access to content or preventing content to be indexed by search engines.

      The nofollow attribute is used to instruct Google that a link should not influence the link target’s ranking – I.E. so it doesnt pass PageRank to target site.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

      Stuart, SEO Chester UK.

      • srllemo
        Reply

        I can agree that nofollow attribute tells google that there is no need to follow a link with nofollow attribute, and google have recomendation on their pages that advertising links need to have this attribute, and google offering advertising web sites this way as proper way to advertise other sites without influencing their ranking with this kind of link.

        But if you specify nofollow attribute in robots meta tags in that case google do not index such a page. This is one of few ways to exclude some page from google indexing.

  4. Guest
    Reply

    I have always felt that good content consistently applied is the greatest thing you can do for your site .. good article.

     

    Schools for Cooking

  5.  Yep, the content has always been the most important, so this makes perfect sense. The best content always gets tons of backlinks.

  6. This goes to support and confirm what we already knew – Content is king.

    Though both inbound and outbound links do help, but its important to have a rich content with relevant keywords if one wants to improve their ranking organically. Again, always avoid those spammy link building sites.

  7. thanks for list

  8. Writing to blogs is a more civil way of spam. You do not need to be original in the blog, as the ultimate purpose is to get the back link. Again a black SEO technique which is termed white.

  9. I maintain a business web site http://www.glenrgraham.com which links to my informational and educational blog at http://www.oklahomacriminaldefense.blogspot.com and I communicate actively with the best criminal defense lawyers in the nation on their blogs and I am active in our local Tulsa criminal defense lawyers and member of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL).   I agree that content is king and that blogging is a natural way of gaining and increasing rank in the bloggersphere.

  10. Most blogs I read are much more spammy than content.  I’m just as bad as the rest.  I have 6 blogs and only one on them is just good, honest content.  How in the world does google determine the good content blogs from the out n out spammy ones?  Especially if they are just being crawled and not read. 

  11. What if you run a blog or a site in a very niche market? When you have written pretty much everything there is to say without getting too technical what do you do then?

    Try to figure out how to write similar post just to keep the blog alive? Getting technical?

    /Habil

  12. pandita
    Reply

    William Callaway is right !

    So much has been written about rich content and blogs. But how does Google identify which is original and right. This articles, is in fact, creating more room for discussions.

    • What is content? I run a very small on-line shop, with lots of products, except for the normal about, contact, returns, privacy, etc. I don’t have, or need anytyhing else for my commercial site. I don’t have time to write nonsense.

      • Writing content for it to be SEO worthy doesn’t mean writing nonsense.

        Good content would be something useful and informative to readers so perhaps you could write some useful things about the products you sell (i.e. how to maximise battery life span if you sell batteries or tips on how to take care of your law mower if you sell law mowers, and so on).

        • was there a limit or prescribe number of words per page/content in a page?

  13. I tought external links were most important.

    • Yes, what is an inbound link? If you need to have your site on other site’s pages,
      I would think that’s outbound link. By listing your site on a number of search engines, malls, do you get higher listing on Google? Listing on FFA pages is getting inbound links? If you do that, how long before you get noticed by Google?

    • As more and more people abuse the system with blackhat tricks to get backlinks, contents seem more important now.

  14. It is easy for me to understand Google saying that.  They are certainly interested in provide relevant results, accurate information and the like. The problem is that the index is FULL of sites with horrible content that are ranked high due to link building.

    I would agree that content is critical, especially for conversion, but anyone that says good content is required to get ranked in Google is living in a dream world.

  15. Let’s not forget that Google is, after all a robot … albeit a sophiticated one.  So while its ability to apply some formula to the words on a page (or indeed from referring pages) I for one don’t accept Google’s capacity to determine what is interesting or informative.  That’s an individual and subjective thing.

  16. but the worst thing in this story is that there will never be a starting point when those priciples will be applied ..

    There will always be a unknown factor..or factors…there will always be someone who gain and someone to loose in the same time ..even if they play the same game, the same rules.

     

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    • that’s one reason i can see why Google decided to ignore "links" somehow, becuase of irrelevancy. (evil grin)

  18. Googgle try to protect their business. If they are not penalize paid listing may be google going to end. Becuase SERP contain unwant result to user. They move to Yahoo or Live.

    So we must folow google rule.

  19. I have found link-building to be tough and time-consuming. But I am making slow progress. However, my main task will always be providing good, fresh content. Does anybody know why Google doesn’t reflect links the way the others such as Yahoo does? If you do a search for links to your site, the sites Yahoo lists are way above what Google lists.

  20. How about links from local directories – are they considered low-quality links as well then?

  21. Google is a mystery no one knows for sure how its algorithm works, probably just few individuals at the helm. So it is better to stick to the basics as being adviced and it is not advisable to ‘fight the system out’ to win mother Google.

    Thanks for the nice articles though.

  22. Guest
    Reply

    An inbound link is a link from another source that comes into your website which in turn can help your rankings if its relevant.Ideally inbound links need to be two things

    Ideally inbound links need to be two things:

    1) From a related site: A dog food company linking to a solicitors website is no good, the linking site needs to be of related content.

    2) From a well connected site: Sites linking to your site also need to be perceived as important by search engines.

    http://www.4psmarketing.com/pr-and-link-building

  23. Well folks, what i think from my prespective what google does is almost fine as the concept of paid directories, paid links are not natural links. It is one type of shortcuts to the achieve top links.

    I can ask questions here:

    What if All try for Paid links, directories etc,,,,, then would there be any natural links?

    What about content if i directly buy thousands of links? I don’t even need a quality content instead my paid links would do it for me,,,,,

     

    So due to such reasons Google would not prefer such type of links.

    Its like this Natural optimization = Natual Content + Natural links

    Some say blogging is spamming but what i would suggest is that if ur doing blogging to get a backlink with natural efforts then it won’t be a spam, as google itself knows that we need to build links as it algo is based on trustworthy links.

    LINKS: 

    •   Quality of links
    •   Quantity of links
    •   Rated Natural Links

     

    "Its like this slow and steady wins the race"

  25. While the bullet points might work for most of the blogs/news sites it doesn’t apply for small niche static websites. In these niches nobody links to each other for free.

  26. This is nothing new in this story. 

    For me:

    •   Quality of links 40% important (1)
    •   Quantity of links 20% important (3)
    •   Rated Natural Links 40% important (2)

     

     

     

     

     

  27. paul
    Reply




    With Google tinkering with the results so frequently – many of my searches now pull up these SOE blogs – which actually while having a lot of content don’t actually give any meaningful information – guess that’s why a robot likes them?

    Most searches I do on Google – I now immediately jump to page 6+ of the results and start seeing the content that I was searching for – if that doesn’t work I’ll try another search engine until I find one optimised for my query.

    The increasingly less relevant results Google are returning for these SEO blogs is a sure sign the SEO’s are winning and they are managing to fool Google into listing their pages first – I guess if it continues like this people will gradually keep moving from Google – wonder what next year’s favourite will be?

  28. I agree with Adam, with this would be easy for a competitor to sabbotage. Useful list mate. Really fresh, unique and quality content is the king.

  29. No offence but this is a very old looking website Albert. I suggest a radical redesign and you might see a difference.

  30. is the answer to everything these days…

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