Industry Articles
Link Building Origins as it Relates to SEO
For those who try to stay on top of the current methods of successful search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, I'm sure are well aware of link building. But, are the search engines, specifically Google, catching up with this technique and adjusting their algorithms accordingly.
SEO in its infancy was easy to attain the desired results in the search engines. Simply adding the chosen keywords to the Meta tags that reside in the sites' code could have your site in prime positions in the search engine results pages (SERPS). But, due to the ability to make a bundle of money by holding those prime positions – Meta tags were abused to the point that they are mostly ignored by the major search engines. SEO evolved from there. The goal of the search engines has always been to deliver the most relevant results to the searcher. If these results are manipulated by people that try and "trick" the search engines; the search engine results are not relevant and the searcher will move on to a different search engine. This is how the struggle between the search engines and the people who do SEO began.
People and companies that perform what is known as "white hat" SEO, do not try and trick the search engines, but try and make theirs and their clients sites the most relevant to the keywords that are being targeted by placing the keywords in a variety of elements of the web page. Some of the page elements that can contain targeted keyword phrases are a page's title, header, ALT tags, Meta tags (though not very effective), etc. and most important is the actual text content on the page. Any and all of these elements can be abused using different techniques. The search engines adjust their algorithms and have filters in place to weed out the sites that are abusing these elements.
Using these methods worked for several years – but the competition in the search engines was fierce. The SEO's were always trying to stay one step a head of the search engines in what worked to have their sites ranking well. And the search engines' goal remained to deliver the most relevant results.
Google, being the search engine giant, developed a system call Page Rank (PR). Google assigned a number between 1 and 10 to every page on the Internet that was in the Google index. PR was based on the number of external links that pointed to a web page, internal links within the web site and the on-page criteria of the site that is linking and the site that is receiving the link. The PR calculation is very detailed and complex. But, a brand new web site would always start at 0 and this would change as more and more sites would link to the new site. Very few sites could ever hope to attain a PR of 10. This is what caused the link building craze of SEO and it's also the origin of the "link farm".
Link farms were sites that were created solely for the purpose of building links to web pages. Usually, there wasn't any relevance to any topic; it was just a site of links. The more links that pointed to a web page; the higher the PR that was assigned to that web page – it was a beautiful thing. Those days are gone and the link farm is dead. And it soon came to be that having high PR had nothing to with where you site would rank in the SERPs.
Google does still use incoming links in its algorithm used to rank sites, but the incoming link needs to have value to help the site that it's linking to rank well in the search engines. The links pointing to a site should be related to the theme or the topic of the web site; the age and "authority" of the web site also holds weight in how much value will be given to the incoming link. This began the birth of the web directory.
It's easy to submit a web site to a directory for a link from the directory to the web site. Directories can be general – having a wide variety of categories or topics; or they can be specific to one topic. Directories are just one of the many resources where SEO's can find sites willing to link to there site. And as with any element of SEO that appears to "work" – it will be abused. And it is being abused. It's only a matter of time, and I believe that time is upon us, where Google will adjust the ranking algorithms to exclude these links that are used to manipulate the search engine rankings.