Human Website

Last month, I took the opportunity to share with you readers a little about what link building is all about and I hope that I have also successfully persuaded you to see the benefits of building links online. So, this month, I would like to delve a little bit more about how to determine the value of each link. There could be tens of thousands of links coming into your website...but what does it all mean to your business or reputation? This is what we are going to look at today.

Links are like votes. Don't take it from me. Take it from the people who founded the concept which are Larry Page and Sergery Brin, the founders of Google who created this concept when they were still at Stanford University in the United States. For those who are unfamiliar with the creators of Google, head on over to InfoLab Stanford University and you will get to learn more about the thesis involving Larry Page and Sergery Brin.

You see, each web page is given a certain amount of 'link juice'. The more link juice you have for that particular web page, the higher you rank on search engines. But not just any link juice. To get the right link juice, you need to first determine the value of the link.

1. Follow and noFollow
If you are using Mozilla, you can see whether the page that you are viewing is a 'Follow' or 'noFollow' link. Google will only give you link juice if the link is a 'Follow' link. If the link that you are getting is a 'noFollow' link, nope...you are not getting any link juice. noFollow link tag tells a search engine that they can't pass link value through this link from one webpage to another webpage. Only links that pass link value can influence your position in a search engine result page. If you have people linking to you on their websites, go to your Mozilla browser and check if you have 'Follow' or 'noFollow' links. Please check the screenshot that I have attached below.

From the screenshot, as you can see, all I had to do was turn on the 'highlight noFollow' links on the browser and the browser will automatically highlight the 'noFollow' links for me in red. Social networking sites are automatically noFollow links because they are trying to prevent spammers from spamming their websites. This not only apply to online social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, it applies to Linkedin, Wikipedia and many, many others.

If you are not using a Mozilla browser, no problem. Go to the link and right click on the link and then choose 'view source'. When the source code appears, click on the 'Control' and 'F' together to open the 'Find' dialog box. Type 'noFollow' into the box. With that, the 'noFollow' links will be highlighted. Go through the source code to see if your link is one of them.

3. Quality and High Authority of Links
Not all incoming links are the same. A link from Yahoo Directory carries far more weight than a link from any other John Doe blog or website. That is why if you want to get a link from Yahoo, you have to be ready to fork out USD$299 for it and it is non-refundable too!

Because getting links coming into a website is always a big thing, inexperienced people actually resort to link farming. Listen, a link coming in from a highly respected and authoritative website like Wikipedia is far better than a thousand links coming in from link farms. And for your information, Google treats link farms like plague. Why?

Let me explain why.

According to Wikipedia, a link farm is any group of websites that hyperlinks to many other sites in the group. In effect, link farms are SPAMMING the search engine index. And now you know why link farms are on Google's list of sites to eliminate when detected.

4. Anchor Text
If you want to get into the top rankings for keywords like 'Malaysia SEO', then you are going to have to work hard at getting links with the text 'Malaysia SEO' coming into your website. This way, whenever people typed in the keyword 'Malaysia SEO', you will come out in the first few pages of the search engine.

That is also why before we embark on any elaborate and extensive search engine marketing and optimization exercise, we need to work on finding the keyword that people are using the most. After finding the keyword that most people are using, you have to try to get as many links using the keywords coming in to your website...NATURALLY.

A good example is this - type 'click here' into Google search. What you will get is a link to Adobe Reader. The reason is because most people use 'click here' as a link to the Adobe Reader's download page.

5. Relevance
I've used this example before but because it explains the theory of relevance so well that I will use it again. A reputable and respected Doctor is only authoritative because he or she is well respected within the same industry. He or she gets recommendation and is recognized as a figure of authority.

With that analogy, the same goes for link building. In order to use link building exercises to influence your search results, you need to build links from relevant web pages. For example, my website is about SEO, SEM and social media marketing. What I need to do now is to go out there and get quality links from within the industry. Links coming in from people who are authoritative in my industry is of much more value compared to links from unrelated web pages.

6. Volume of Links
The more quality link there are out there pointing to your website, the more important your website is to search engine. Why do you think Wikipedia is so important to Google? It is because there are tens of thousands of websites all around the world that is pointing to.

7. Human Generation
Sure, you can get automated links, software and other free tools to get more links coming into your website for your preferred keywords. It is faster compared to what people can do manually but let this be said that links manually generated by real human beings are better. Google recognizes that human beings are far more selective in giving out links than automated software that breezily generates them.