It was made clear at the recent a4uexpo I attend that gaining backlinks is the key to success and indeed Covaris have agreed with this stating:

The number one page feature that determines rank continues to be the number of external inbound links. “It’s about how many backlinks does this page have and are they also authoritative? If you’re trying to get a good ranking, the goal is to build out links.”

Craig Mcdonald realises that the ever changing methods of ranking by search engines needs to be monitered, reported on, assessed and acted upon continually to help marketeers establish the best course of action to take when pushing for higher rankings and the emphasis that search engine spiders have on different factors both on site and off site.

It seems however that in order to try this software, see its price, or understand more about the product you have to contact a sales agent directly and I found myself moving in circles trying to find this simple information and getting no where.

I wonder if I could find a product for them that helps turn someone like me into a sale, then again with no mention of price anywhere I am lead to assume that I wouldnt be able to afford it anyway!

It was made perfectly clear in the expo from all the SEO guys there that the best and most effective way of driving traffic to a website is via back links. Lets repeat that, get BACK LINKS… still not clicking? JUST GET BACK LINKS. (though of course adding good content is a natural generator of back links as well and makes life a little easier).

But, bearing in mind that the internet is pretty vast, and also that im currently trying to help a client deal with a rather unscrupulous rip off merchant based on the other side of the planet, the question arouse about using back links and generating back links to your competitors.

eh? give my competitors back links?  Are you mental?

nope. But I wish I was.

Who said they had to be good back links?

Let me clarify.  Simply put the Google algorithm likes high quality sites (lets say for example, the BBC.co.uk). As far as Google are concerned the BBC can basically do no wrong, its respected, established and considered an authority. Hence its always pretty nice to get a back link from them to you by being news worthy in some form or other. Also it would be high on impossible to pull them down with the Golden Bullet Backlink due to this already established authority.

Hence we all work hard at generating back links, a mention, and editorial, or advertorial to include a link from these respected authority sites to your own.

Reverse Engineering Backlinks

But what if you decided to reverse engineer the back linking protocol?  How about targeting all your competitors and generating back links to them from the dirtiest,  scummiest,  spammy websites around all the bad neighbourhoods on the internet… god its scary, but it seems that these “services” are currently on offer.  Its also been a concern of mine for some time and a reason I hate the requirement of back links as they are simply beyond your control.

Now you add all these back links to your competitors and there rankings begin to drop, their respect and authority is reduced and you climb the rankings to fill the void.  Result.  Also how do you think they will remove these back links?

Think about this for a second.

Thought about it? Any ideas?… me either.

It would be a manual, long winded process of sending emails and requests if not downright begging letters to these bad neighbourhoods to try and convince them to remove this god forsaken link that’s hurting your site.  Do you think they would care? Now imagine you had 1000 of these links pointing at you from 1000 different sites.

That has got to be a scary, scary situation to be in.

The Golden Bullet

The way it stands now is that you can actually employ services to utilise this tactic on your behalf.  I’m not clear on the numbers, the effectiveness, or how Google (never mind LIVE and Yahoo) actually reacts to this or what processes are in place to address it, but will certainly be looking into it.

If any of you guys know anything about it, please do drop me a comment  but in the meantime, please dont think about walking down this road!

Linking and backling is a subtle subject which can require serious time and effort.

Linking itself is broken down into 1 way, 2 way reciprocal (mutual) and 3 way.

•    3 way linking involves a link coming from a site, to another site, then to you.
•    2 way reciprocal (mutual) is a link from a site to another and that site links back
•    1 way, as anyone will tell you, is the best as it involves a link from another site directed at you. However it has its dangers as well.

Links (or backlinks) act like referrals for both the visitor and the Search Engine.  Imagine getting a referral in everyday life.  Someone you know has recommended your business, product or service because they believe in it and have used it themselves. That’s a one way link.

Now imagine that person was a Doctor who recommended you, someone who is respected, qualified, established, that’s an excellent one way link.

But alternatively, imagine it was the local hustler. Shady, untrustworthy, of dubious character and intent. That is a one way link you don’t want.

Website linking is exactly the same in this respect.  Get a good quality link from a well respected site and these sites can be authority sites, in your sector or industry or related to your business.  All the rest are a waste of time as a single link such as this may be worth 1000 + poor quality links.  It is getting them that is the hard part.

A Link is typically pointed at a HREF which is simply web speak for “Hyper Reference” due to the information in a web page being referred to as Hyper-something (eg HTML stands for Hyper Text Markeup Language) .

Linking Out to other sites (giving a one way link)

One interesting point to note, in the social media sphere, when you wish to refer to someone else’s material, rather than going down the route of ripping off their content and adding it to your own site it is considered beneficial, professional even, to simply refer and link directly to that content on the original site.  I am convinced that Google account for the fact that you have made this flow of information available and it is a reflection on your quality and confidence in your material as well as the benefits to the searcher.

The jusries still out on this one however as ppeople are more worried that to much linking out will be detrimental to your own sites reputation.  Personally I believe it will take alot more than a few relevant links to cause a bad effect and in the interim it will only serve to benefit.

On this blog itself I have enabled the “Do Follow” attribute to allow some of my Page Rank to be transferred to people who comment on my blog.  I believe in giving back a little to those who take the time to add to the information I post.

asp hyperlink | strange indeed

While doing so keyword research about hyperlinks I came across a page on Microsoft which apprently gets loads of traffic for the term “asp hyperlink“. I searched for “asp hyperlink” and got the Microsoft site.  This asp hyperlink page details in tech speak the code behind applying a hyperlink.  I thought this search term seemed a bit strange but apparently alot of people search for it.

With copy like this:

This control can be used to display user input, which might include malicious client script. Check any information that is sent from a client for executable script, SQL statements, or other code before displaying it in your application.ASP.NET provides an input request validation feature to block script and HTML in user input. Validation server controls are also provided to assess user input. For more information, see Validation Server Control Syntax.

I cant for the live of me figure out who would want to search for it, read it or even understand it to be frank.  Each to there own I guess.  Now go get some backlinks!

Plenty of simple ways are available to check the backlinks to your site and the results you get while performing a backlink check can vary greatly and hence can cause some confusion as to their significance.

To complete a backlink check we can use three different methods to complete the process.

Google Backlink Checker

- Open www.google.com
- in the search bar type in:
- link:http://www.justinparks.com
- and the backlink check result

The information here tells me that I have 6 other sites and pages linking to my full website address. But by clicking the option along the bottom of the page where it says:

“In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 6 already displayed.If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.”

The new results tell me there are 11 links pointing to my site. The problem is quite are few of these links are my own pages linking to other internal pages and thus wont be generating me alot of traffic but these do help the traffic when it arrives by offering ways of navigating to other relevent content.

Yahoo Backlink Checker

So lets try the yahoo.com backlink checker. Follow the same process as for www.google.com in the Yahoo search bar.

- Open www.yahoo.com
- in the search bar type in:
- link:http://www.justinparks.com
- and the backlink checker result

Results are telling me I have 119 backlinks and 427 “inlinks”.

And finally lets go to the MSN backlink checker. Or rather lets not. MSN.com doesn’t allow you to do a “link:mysite.com” query at the moment as apparently they where being spammed by “bots”. Oh Dear.

iwebtool.com Backlink Checker

Now lets ask a third party. Lets use the backlink checker tool on iwebtool.com:

- Open http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker
- in the text bar type in http://www.justinparks.com
- and the backlink checker result

The information here is totally different to the google result as it tells me I have backlinks totalling 322. A handy little feature here is also the pagerank display showing each of these pages and how “valuable” they are in the backlink hierarchy.

Now the problem is, who do I believe? What information is relevent to me and my site?

All of the information provided by these backlink checkers is relevant in my opinion. The reason that the results differ will be down to each backlink checkers method of obtaining the results. For example, Google may only consider a backlink from a ranked page that has a Google PR of 1 or more (this isn’t fact is just to illustrate the point) so all the pages linking back to me are valuable in there own way according to Google.

Yahoo will follow the same format, but Yahoo does not employ the Page Rank system so will use a different method of establishing the links from other sites and may have different filters in place to return the result of backlinking pages.

The iwebtool.com backlink checker is exactly the same as both Yahoo and Google having set parameters against the results returned.

The best advice that can be given then is to review all three of these backlink checkers regularly and simply keep active on the internet, searching for relevant and quality websites related to your information specifically. Also the backlinks will occur naturally as you progress as other people will choose to link to your content (always nice) if they value it and believe it is relevant to them. The process can be long winded but the current internet based algorithms seem to like it and want it to continue.

Until that is they decide that some other method should be used…