Just an Observation concerning Backlinking

Marketing
1

I’ve been testing different backlinking techniques over the past year. Here’s what I’ve concluded:

Sig links - can work, but these aren’t good for the long term. You miss a couple days of backlinking w/ sig links, and your site(s) will drop in the SERPs.

Directories - Forget them…need I say more

Article Submission - You can get referral traffic from these sites like EZA or GoArticles - and yeah - sure, they will appear in your backlink list - however, I don’t think they can move you up a lot from what I’ve seen. but there were times when I would have an article from GoArticles and EZA along with my site on the first page…totally dominating my niche. The CTR from with these articles and from what I’ve experienced is pretty low - and I’ve had some very well written articles.

However, I think if you get enough articles that are unique and well written, this might be the best approach???

Social BookMarking Sites - A few sites like Digg and Reditt can bring you referal traffic. I’ve noticed that Digg can get indexed in less than 24 hours but then will drop in the SERPs over time. Overall, I didn’t see Social BM sites help my sites in the SERPs. And G has to know about them and dismisses them as spam since a lot of ppl do bookmarking in order to gain one way links. I think G is much smarter than that and knows that a lot of these links in these type of sites are not natural.

Press Release Sites - I’ll be tring this next week - so I guess I’ll see for myself.

Profile linkes (or as some ppl would like to refer them as “Angela’s Links” (which turns my stomach)) - I don’t bother with them…

Web 2.0 properties such as Squidoo and Hubpages - I really don’t think they can push your site up that much but again, will get some referral traffic.

As far as online opimization - for my own personal sites (and not really my clients), I focus on material that I have a passion for. I write lots of pages and make sure they are well optimized (sometimes usually for long tailed KWs) and have been seeing results from that. If you were to pick one or the other, I would think that online is really more important than offline/backlinking. Seems that G rewards you if you have a lot of material that is unique.

Conclusion - Spend more time optimizing your site than backlinking. For me, I think I have gotten further with writing more interesting pages than trying to backlink the heck out of my site(s). This is my own opinion - what have been your experiences?

2

Well, I would disagree with you on this.

Link building is one of the most important part of marketing and ranking on serps. We shouldn’t generalize the link building like that. The main concept of proper link building should target the websites that are related and dofollow. Be that social sites, article site whatever.

Just my opinion:)

3

I think for one reason people go for backlink in getting higher rank in google search or others.It will surely bring you traffic thru search engine if not directly.

4

Sig links aren’t as good because all the backlinks are coming form the same site. Google values backlinks that are coming from different sources so don’t be surprised that theoretically you have 500 backlinks but bad rankings if they all come from one forum.

5

What methodology did you use to test? Please describe it.

6

Backlinks to deeper pages is the key. It’s one thing to get home page links, but you may want to get people to inner pages and departments in site. This is where articles on such topics with anchor text links helps.

7

I feel google takes the backlinks (though there are many from one forum / blog), google takes all the backlinks.

I experience (d) this.

Thanks

8

hello all
Am new to this forum.

I have one doubt atonce i opened this discussion.

Only Sitepoint Guru has do follow signature. Others have no-follow signature?

How come??

9

Google is a CAPITALIST it favors MONOPOLISTS as usual and so now is Wikipedia: it has refused links because it’s not OFFICIAL. Oh yes welcome to ALL COMMERCIAL WEBS AND SPAMMERS.

These Guys have profited from the slogan of democratic web, the web is less and less democratic and more and more commercial and spammy. Under the guise of fighting spams for quality they are disqualifying small sites and only favor the big ones whatever the quality of the content because their algorithm is pretty useless to detect real quality.

An algorithm basing quality on just backlinks, a five year old child can do it, no need to recruit brains at Google. Google is eve more evil now than Microsoft.

10

I see this again and again and again on SitePoint. We get webmasters on here who want to know how many backlinks they need and how to generate them. Stop searching for quick and easy links! It simply doesn’t work like that!

The basic idea of Google’s ranking when it comes to links is that you need quality. Websites that exist to simply generate links like article directories, forum signatures, blog signatures, social bookmarking, etc are nearly worthless. Stop wasting your time and focus on creating a quality website that is useful to your audience.

When you create decent content, other people will link to you. This is the entire goal. Too often we’re creating our own backlinks which is ridiculous. It’s like we’re endorsing our own websites. Can you think of anything more corrupt?

If you have a quality website then it will be noticed and spread like wildfire. If the talented folks on this forum would spend half as much time working on their website as they did “generating backlinks” we’d all be in a much better place.

11

Can anyone explain this???

12

@harishsyndrome , @altax
Re: Sig Links
The signature links become “follow” after a certain post count is reached.
But it doesn’t make any difference because all sig links are “no show” no matter what a members post count is. That is, only logged in members can see sigs at all. Search engines are not “logged in” so they never see any signatures.

Signature links are for the benefit of other members, not SEO

13

Thanks for your reply but do you mean that search engine never at all take this as a backlink? So signature in this SP is only used within members, Isn’t it?

14

If you are trying to index your site on google then social bookmarking is good. As you have said, I tried about 35 SB sites and only digg comes on the top with some referral traffic. So, for backlink and PR social bookmarking is ok. For traffic we should find another way.