Only natural links are good links
Tags: backlinks, google, search engine ranking, seo
Google is getting more and more sophisticated in its ability to detect dubious SEO practices they frown upon - whether done by intention or by accident.
Doorway pages, cloaking, and hidden text are old hat now and rarely effective, although it annoys me to see some sites still getting away with these techniques. The current big issue that Google is cracking down on is “unnatural” linking; it’s high on their list of things that’ll get your wrist slapped, and your website dropped in the search results.
Unnatural linking is linking between websites that is intended to manipulate pagerank between the websites, rather than being a link to a resource simply because one website believes the resource on the other website is valuable to their own visitors and readership. Paid for links, reciprocal linking and even soliciting one way links to your website are all forms of unnatural linking.
Paid for links can be detected fairly easilly as can reciprocal links, but what about soliciting one way links? How can that be detected? Reading around the subject it’s possible that pages or narrative on your website that deal explicitly with “how to link to us” and offer code to do so, could be a dead giveaway and may see your website’s backlinks viewed less favourably than they might otherwise be. Certainly on a couple of SEO forums I follow, there appears to be a correlation between websites that have dropped in their search engine ranking and a proactive “link to us” policy.
Another SEO quandry presents itself - knowing how important links are to your website, who in their right mind will not be proactive in building such links? It seems Google really does want webmasters to focus on content and nothing else, and expects us to sit there hoping the links will come.
So what should you do on your website - well in the first instance, I’d recommend removing link to us text/code/schemes from your website; by all means continue to be proactive in requesting that other websites link to you - it just might be better to do it by email or over telephone nowadays!!
I’m not serious about the second part (or am I), the emphasis needs to be on building a good resource. This way links will come naturally, and from sites with similar interests, which will give your website’s pagerank the biggest boost.
