Buried Link Treasure: The Acquisition of Quality Backlinks

As we all know, link building has become a bit more difficult these days. Google has recently come out with a new campaign to filter out paid links, or links that are purchased solely for the purposes of gaining additional link popularity. This has been going on for several years, but lately they have been much more aggressive in their approach. One of the first signs of this crack down was the filtering of approximately 50 paid web directories.

Google has also attacked many large text link brokers and text link rental companies. These actions have caused concern with anyone and everyone that competes in the natural search results by buying links and doing everything they can to increase their link popularity.

Ground Rules:

First off, link building is here to stay. However, all website owners need to take Google’s position on link building into consideration before negotiating new links, new partnerships, or even buying links in certain capacities. It is essential to operate in a manner that is in-line with Google’s webmaster guidelines. At the end of the day, Google does not want businesses artificially inflating their backlinks or their link popularity. That being said, it is important that businesses compete and do what they can to get better rankings in the search results.

Tactics:

Uncovering buried link treasure is an effective (and Google compliant) strategy in increasing a website’s backlinks. This excavation involves analyzing the backlinks of competitive, high ranking websites for different key terms.

Yahoo’s site explorer can be used to begin this process. A backlink check can simply be run by typing: link:domain (more specific instructions). The results will show all the websites that link to that domain. Yahoo also does a decent job organizing these links based on popularity which is determined by its value and contribution to the high ranking websites. While this program isolates quality links it is only the beginning of the treasure hunt. (more…)