The idea that links from other sites to your own, actually aid your site, is a logical one. But can back-links hurt or harm your ranking?
Many of us search engine optimization experts keenly know what this term means, but for the rest of us it simply means getting links from other sites to your own.
Traditionally, this was done by asking friends and foes to link to you, and this was acceptable for a while but the search engines soon began to devalue these reciprocal efforts because Tom would call Harry, Bella, Davis and Susan to ask them to link to his site and Google particularly thought that this activity was simply contrived and not natural.
Spam is known by some as that tasty meat from which the current swine flu propagates, lol, sorry couldn't help myself, but in Internet lingo it is also known as the junk email that attempts to get commercial gain.
Examples of this, many unscrupulous spam masters send out unsolicited commercial spam email to millions of unsuspecting users. Others created fake websites and pages with links back to their own - not the phrase "their own" - commercial products - hence the need for objective PageRank and PageTrust. At that time, the search engines were not looking at the following things such as which reciprocal links were owned by the same person or which chain of anchored links were with the same ISP. In order to slow down the spammer type group, this information is deemed to be rather important for determining exactly who the spammers are.
Perhaps one of the most important aspects to the backlinking process is in what keywords one uses - traditionally, this has been where most linking efforts have fallen down.
Why? Because unless you created the links yourself, you can't determine how someone else will link to your site.
Also, since as a casual reader, you are not likely to be an expert on niche market keywords, one is going to most logically try to pick the keywords having the most traffic. Is this a mistake? A brand new website, even after being indexed by Yahoo or most search engines, doesn't stand a prayer for getting traffic based on the most highly trafficked keywords - sorry but this wait for traffic could extend to many months or even years.
So, possibly a waste of time, right?
The potential problems don't stop there. Initially a new html or htm page has a Google Rank of N/A. Then after its indexed, typically 0 where Zero is not good and 10 is the best. Some may say differently while a new page with N/A or O as its rank can have a freshness quotient that can help it positively, in most search engines, this zero which is evidence of lack of backlinks will assuredly work negatively against it.
Exceptions abound however and if the newly created page is sitting on a highly popular Web 2 social network property like squidoo or craigslist, bebo or scribd to name a few then it won't be penalized as much just because its current pagerank or credibility level appears to be a zero.
We suspect these exceptions work because, it is thought that new pages on foundation sites such as those with a PageTrust of 5 or above, inherently acquire some of the PageRank or PageTrust of the site that they rest on.
All sounds rather complicated huh? What can a novice do ?
Google's time worn advice, go back to basics, create good and get creative. They would recommend strongly that we even create "link-bait" that will cause others to want to link to you.And that's inherently a great idea if you have any idea what this link-bait thing means. Its never a great idea to truly ignore what Google recommends, however I urge you to examine the issues involved in creating link-bait more deeply. Do you really have 8-9 months that it takes to consistently create new articles on a daily basis, and to publish a huge amount of intensely likable content in one spot that would cause people to socially bookmark that page on your site - If the answer is no then you understand why most of us will never ever intentionally create link-bait.
There has to be ways around this. What should one do?
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