SEO Notes: Backlink Buidling
By spradlig
SEO Basics
On Page factors:
- Meta Tags: Title, Description, and Keyword tags should be optimized for 1 keyword
- Content: The primary keyword should show up about 2 times for every 100 words (this is a keyword density of approx. 2%)
- Navigation Links (i.e. links in the page header, footer, or side bar that show up on every page) do not count as much as Links within the text but they still count
Off Page factors:
- These are primarily the quantity and quality of the backlinks to your page - a link from someone's "Links" page is useful but not as much as a link from a blog posting or journal article, etc
- Any backlink is a good backlink even a NOFOLLOW backlink, however, NOFOLLOW backlinks will not help your Page Rank (PR) or your placement on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) - NOFOLLOW backlinks are good for exposure to new visitors and can get your site spidered or crawled more often
- The PR is thought to be a logrithmic scale - like Earthquakes and the Richter scale - so a link from a PR 2 is 10x more powerful for you than a link from a PR 1
Notes on NOFOLLOW
The NOFOLLOW tag was created by Google in order to thwart spammers who were blasting forums, blogs, etc. with spam links in order to improve their sites' SERP position and PR. As a result most modern forum and blogging software is set to a default where the links are NOFOLLOW from any user's post. Spammers still post spam links so someone out there has forgotten their NOFOLLOW tags but most default installations of the more popular software already includes NOFOLLOW.
Every page of new content creates more PR - or at least further divides Google's finite PR total. Since links with the NOFOLLOW do not convey PR you can use the NOFOLLOW tag to control the distribution of PR from your own content. For example, your business may have a Contact Us or Privacy Policy page. Neither need to have good PR and neither will ever rank well in Google. Do not waste PR from your "money" pages by bleeding it off to pages like your Privacy Policy.
Be careful when you buy or trade backlinks to get backlinks that are DO FOLLOW (this really just means they lack the NOFOLLOW tag there is no DO FOLLOW tag that I'm aware of - occasionally you will see someone put DO FOLLOW into their HTML code but I don't think Google pays any attention).
Conventional Wisdom on Backlinks
The conventional wisdom on backlinks is that only DOFOLLOW count. When it comes to PR and SERP position this is correct. However, I get significant traffic from NOFOLLOW links on Wikipedia and Wikibooks to my ControlTheoryPro.com site.
Conventional wisdom also states that the PR of the page your link is on is very important. I have found this to be less true than many proponents claim. I have creating DO FOLLOW backlinks on sites with a high PR. However, the high PR is for the home page and the new page I'm creating has no PR at all. I've done almost exclusively this as a backlinking strategy for 2 of my sites. (My other backlinks are about a dozen articles on Ezine and HubPages split btwn the 2 sites.) The site I have spent the most time on has first page SERP position for keywords that I have never ever written an article on. These links are very slow to show up on Google's or Yahoo's listing of backlinks. However, as I've said I show up on the first page the SERP for several keywords that have decent competition and my only backlinks to the page come from this method of creating a new page (PR 0) with a link in it.
So while I certainly believe that a link from a PR 9 is worth much much more than a link from a PR 0 don't be so quick to discount the effectiveness of those PR 0 links.
Comments
I agree, NOFOLLOW is more complex than it initially sounds.
I also have a few links on Wikipedia (and a lot more on Wikibooks) to one of my sites. The niche is small so the traffic numbers are not big but it helped build credibility, search engine indexing, and some steady traffic for the site.
Also, I have no proof but I think NOFOLLOW links on sites like Wikipedia still build a certain amount of authority for your site. I don't think the same is true of lesser sites but is (possibly) for Wikipedia in particular. Wikipedia is NOFOLLOW for all links. Google knows this but it also knows that the links are human added, human reviewed, and often yanked. I'm not entirely convinced that NOFOLLOW on Wikipedia is the same as NOFOLLOW everywhere else.
I think the age of the link on Wikipedia may play a big role in what credibility/authority Google gives to links in Wikipedia. Google is interested in quality sites on every conceivable topic and if a human added, human reviewed link has remained untouched for months on Wikipedia that's a good sign the link is a quality link.
But this is all conjecture nothing solid or proven.
mc23g 2 years ago
I'd like to add something; Although nofollow doesn't pass PR, it can still be a valuable source of traffic (and links). One of my sites is listed on Wikipedia, and it constantly drives traffic to that site. In fact, since Wikipedia gets scraped by blogs and article directories, and those links are usually dofollow, it also creates backlinks (indirectly). Don't count out nofollow links, especially if they're on authority websites. Great Hub!