SEO 101: Link diversity…a good thing
August 24, 2007
One of the surest signs of a less than adequate SEO effort is a lop sided, or less than diverse source of links. Search engines can (and do) see who links to your site (and everyone else who wants to rank for “your” keywords). They see who you are linking to as well.
They can see the anchor text with which you have linked. They can see the title tags of the page that linked to you. They know whether that page is a home page on the site that linked to you. In short, if it is text and on your site or someone else’s, TRUST me. They know about it.
Some of these linking strategies have gone out of “style” with certain search engines **COUGH** Google **COU GH**
Now that we all agree on that, doesn’t it make sense to have someone do your search engine optimization campaign who can a) provide a DIVERSE set of links from literally ALL available sources b) provide insight into COMING likely changes as search engines to help you move away from techniques that are out of favor with Google c) who knows not only what Google SAYS be what they are DOING about which types of links.
We commonly use 10 different TYPES of links here. (No, I am not mentioning them here…grin…and these are just the ones that come to mind easily). Then we use MANY different types of anchor text. We proactively try to help you make sure that you are not HEAVY into a type of linking that has gone out of vogue or may get you penalized. The NET result is that we try to create a broad-based link portfolio that will stand the test of time. This gives you the best ROI you can possibly acheive.
Just like the wonderful melting pot that we call the USA, diversity is a good thing in link building.
Great article. The stuff that worked in the past, doesn’t mean its a good thing to do now. Things like state pages where you have every state with 32236646 links from other persons on it linking back to you can get you a penalty from google. Being able to justify WHY you have a link from a person is one of the first questions you should be asking yourself.