Feb
Links Rule, but Beware of Search Filters
The quickest way to make it to the top of search engine rankings, certainly in Google’s case, is through quality inbound links to your site, also known as backlinks.
That being said, Google and the other search engines employ a series of filters so that you can’t game the system with phoney or irrelevant links.
Consider these potential traps:
Link relevancy: Those searchbots are programmed to check your links for relevancy, so if you join a link farm and link to everyone there, you might not only get no help in the SERPs (search engine results pages), but you might get penalized. Another term for this is bad neighborhood. If you link to spammers or gamers, even unwittingly, that can hurt you in the rankings.
Link speed: By this I mean if you have a sudden surge (there’s that word again) of links, you could draw the suspicion of the spiders and indexers. For instance, some people will purchase programs such as RSS 2 Blog and build hundreds of instantaneous, automated blogs linking to their sites. This will end up costing them, though it may work for a while. (Sometimes these people only want a momentary rush to sell what they’re currently offering and then they move on to a new scheme.)
Broken links: The robots check your site for broken links and report back to Google (and others) the name and number of them. While this may not reduce your organic search standing, it could hurt you for unprofessionalism in your site’s programming. MSN is a big stickler on proper html usage.
Link bombing: A couple of years ago, someone put out a call to link to George Bush’s biography page at whitehouse.gov with the keywords “miserable failure.” Google has since developed an alogorithm to prevent what is called “link bombing” such as the one in this example.
Moral: Building your links patiently and honestly, and in time you’ll be rewarded with a higher organic search ranking. (Meanwhile, use AdWords to build your site traffic.)
