Backlinking
Published: August 4th, 2008
Posted by: Kevork Aghazarian
NOTE: This article will be updated with backlinks as they are discovered.
A backlink in Search Engine Optimization is an incoming link to a website. Generally speaking, the more backlinks a website has the higher its popularity rating for search engines. To add to that, if you link back to websites linking to you, your rating gains a little boost. This popularity rating helps search engines determine your placement in search results.
When we optimize a website for better placement on major search engines like Google, we generally perform legal backlinking techniques to help our target website reach higher position in results. We say legal because there are darker ways of backlinking websites which will usually not work in the long-term and hurt a websites position if found to be cheating.
Black SEO, which is surprisingly still used by many web firms, is the practice of cheating to get a website ranked higher in search results. Backlinking is abused by placing links to a website everywhere and even on websites that have nothing to do with the target site. Selling links between webmasters is also common in black SEO. Although these forbidden techniques may work for a period of time, when search engines finally pickup on the cheating (Google is quite proefficient at this), they will permanently blacklist or severely penalize your website.
The white way of backlinking is to contact the owners of websites that are on the first page of results for your target keywords and see if they are willing to place a link toy our site in exchange for you placing a link to theirs on yours. Generally speaking it should not just be a link, but search engines will not penalize you as the sites you are link sharing are similar in keywords to your site. Ideally, having many natural backlinks to your website is the best way to go. You can see examples of back links to us like at W3Schools or at the Web Developer Forums. Both are good examples as they are naturally occurring and not link trading. More forum examples can be found at DeviantArt, CSS Drive, Layers Magazine and Designers Talk. These forums are related to our website and some actually discuss our design techniques.
These backlinks where found using Googles Webmaster Tools as well as Back Link Watch. Both tools give varying results but nonetheless offer a great way to see what websites are linking to you. We were surprised to find links coming from two independent blogs: Gregory Wilson's Ramblings and Rich Shupe/Zevan Rosser. Of course most websites we build for clients offer easy backlinks to our website and theirs. The controversy here is that if the websites we build are not related to us, linking between each other may hurt our rankings. This is simply not true, Google and other major search engines can tell the difference between black blacklinking and white backlinking. Plus, you cannot control who decides to link to your website, so you couldn't possibly be penalized for things out of your control as a webmaster.
For the best results in your SEO endeavors, trusting us to get your website to the optimal location in results is the smart choice. Our extensive and ever adapting knowledge in SEO allows us to offer the best and most recent techniques to our clients. Contact us for more information.
What does Google do different?
There are hundreds of search engines on the web but only a handful are in the spotlight and only one is the crown prince, Google.
It seems that Google is the only search engine that stands out from the rest, which include: Yahoo! Search, Microsoft Live Search, Ask, AllTheWeb, AOL Search, HotBot, AltaVista, Gigablast, LookSmart, Lycos Search, Netscape (Run by AOL and enhanced by Google) and DMOZ (backed by AOL). And of course, there are many more, but Google tends to take the spotlight, and with good reason, here is why:
Google has a plethora of applications or services it has distributed, generally all free, and mostly all useful. Examples like Gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps. Google tends to dip its hand into many aspects of the internet and almost everyone who uses the net know what Google is.
On terms of search; Google is an amazing search engine, allowing you to find almost anything on the web. Take a simple example, we typed the following into Google and got 33 thousand results: dfgdsfg. Typing gibberish in Google still gets you results, showing you how extensive Google's index of web pages is.
Review: Rich Shupe/Zevan Rosser, Gregory Wilson's Ramblings, Designers Talk, DeviantArt, CSS Drive, Layers Magazine.