Wednesday 20 January 2016

Link Wars: The Force Awakens

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Google’s algorithm to impact website visibility takes hundreds of factors into account, but none of them have been as important and impactful as the almighty link.

When I first started in SEO more than 10 years ago, the link was the most powerful factor in improving your search engine rankings, especially if you secured links from high-quality, trusted domains with keyword-rich anchor text from sites with high Page Rank.

Getting a link used to be the way Google found and indexed sites. A lot of companies made a lot of money by selling links, because back then it was easy to manipulate rankings in various ways, including:

  • Getting links from affiliate networks.
  • Purchasing links from high-authority sites.
  • Obtaining links from .gov and .edu sites by exchanging some services or items.
  • Using blog networks.
  • Procuring links from microsites.
  • Purchasing domains just for links.

Those were the good old days. But now, a link is just a link, unless it is clicked on many times by humans with specific intent, which is the new force in search.

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

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