Google Defines "Good and Bad" Links

Loren Baker from Search Engine Journal has written a post about Google finally defining link building and the value of link popularity. Google uses an algorithm that ranks pages in its search engines based largely upon links to it from other pages. Loren says that any link earned from hard work such as quality, ideas, originality, and building an authentic site will count highly and favorably in the Google ranking algorithm. Here is some more info about the definition from Google's Stefanie Ulrike Dürr:

Discounting non-earned links by search engines opened a new and wide field of tactics to build link-based popularity:

* Classically this involves optimizing your content so that thematically-related or trusted websites link to you by choice.

* A more recent method is link baiting, which typically takes advantage of Web 2.0 social content websites.

* One example of this new way of generating links is to submit a handcrafted article to a service such as http://digg.com.

* Another example is to earn a reputation in a certain field by building an authority through services such as http://answers.yahoo.com.

Our general advice is: Always focus on the users and not on search engines when developing your optimization strategy. Ask yourself what creates value for your users. Investing in the quality of your content and thereby earning natural backlinks benefits both the users and drives more qualified traffic to your site.

The policy reaffirms what has been said for a long time. Focusing on making a quality site for readers will lead to better search engine ranking through ever-increasing links. Link building has a variety of goals that vary between content creators:

• Build targeted traffic
• Attract valuable and positive user intent driven links
  
• Attract users who will essentially follow a call to action
  
• Establish the site as a resource amongst other resources in its field
  
• Engagement of thoughtful discussion or debate

Now what exactly is bad linking then?

We’ve always taken a clear stance with respect to manipulating the PageRank algorithm in our Quality Guidelines.

Despite these policies, the strategy of participating in link schemes might have previously paid off.

But more recently, Google has tremendously refined its link-weighting algorithms. We have more people working on Google’s link-weighting for quality control and to correct issues we find.

So nowadays, undermining the PageRank algorithm is likely to result in the loss of the ability of link-selling sites to pass on reputation via links to other sites.

There you have it straight from Google: Good linking vs. Bad linking.

Tags: blog, blogs, link building, links traffic, quality, Google, Page Rank, algorithm, links