When it comes to relevancy in a search engine, inbound links pointing to your web site can be a huge contributor to how important Google thinks that your page / information is and subsequently, how your page can be ranked for particular search terms. Link building is of course one facet of SEO that should be focused on by your search engine optimization team, but I’m a huge believer in quality over quantity: here’s why…..

Many people have read a book, or a blog article, or a tweet about how important it is to get inbound links from everywhere, I firmly believe that it’s much more important to focus on quality inbound links rather than a multitude of non related, non quality links.  When you put yourself in the shoes of the Great Google, you have to realize that Google is ranking sites based on relevancy, if your inbound links are all coming from a non-relevant source (based on your web site content or genre) and pointing to your web site, how can Google determine the relevancy of your web site? For example, Your new non-profit organization that is driven to save the elusive carpet beetle from extinction wants some inbound links, you find a great resource of free page rank 3 inbound links from Bob’s discount mail order brides and submit….. Is this relevant? Nope, not even close. Wasted time, and potentially hazardous to your web site and it’s Google rankings.   Now, if you submitted your non-profit to the friends of Carpet Beetle foundation web site, or the study for the enrichment of the Carpet Beetle’s web site, you’d have a tight connection and a more targeted inbound link.

Bad Neighborhoods: Just like you would not locate your non-profit carpet beetle’s non-profit office in a bad section of town, you also need to be cautious of web sites from the wrong side of town.  Google can penalize a site if it has an inbound link coming to it from a bad neighborhood, this includes link farms, shady porn sites, dangerous or malicious code sites, etc.

Give & Take: Don’t forget to share the love.  The more you give, the more you get.  Be sure to start a links page on your web site to offer a link back if you get some link love from others.  This is good Karma and just an over-all swell thing to do for your fellow humanity.

Bottom line: submit when it makes sense.  Seek relevancy, seek out sites that make sense to your content and seek out sites that have been tried and trusted by Google.

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Tags: seo