Link building is by far one of the most important things to do when it comes to SEO for your site, simply because search engines such as Google rely heavily on the amount and the trust factor of the links that point back to your site. You could consider each link you get, a vote of confidence from another site, and Google uses this as a metric to estimate how important and relevant your site is, and what place they will give you in the search results.
Having said that, Quality links are far more important than Quantity links. As a rule of thumb; The easier it is to get a link, the less voting power it most likely has. I’ve written about low quality links before. Quick and easy link building strategies are not the way to go. However, sometimes there is a use for quantity, and I’ll elaborate a little on that.
There are a lot of companies who offer something called competitor link building services – all this means is that they go and figure out which backlinks your competitors have, and try to replicate them. There’s nothing wrong with this from a new client’s point of view, as long as it’s not the only thing they do. Catching up won’t win the game. You’ll need to outdo your competitors backlink profile in order to get ahead and win the race.
Dilute your backlink profile
Now let’s say you’re the one with an established site and back-link profile – wouldn’t it be really annoying to find out that your competitors are simply stealing all of your hard link building work? One of the most popular tools to get an overview of a site’s back-link profile is Yahoo Site Explorer, but this is fortunately limited to 1000 visible links. If your site had only high quality backlinks, it would give the competition 1000 high quality link opportunities presented on a silver plate. However, if you “dilute” the backlink profile with several low quality, site-wide backlinks, it would quickly fill up 90% or more of the Yahoo Site Explorer results, leaving much to guess for the competition. (a site-wide link is a blogroll link for example, which will appear on every single page of a site).
There are of course tools available that will show a lot more back-link data, but most of these are set at quite a high price point, so that a lot of the small time, low quality link builders can’t or won’t spend the money on them. This isn’t a bullet proof anti-competitive link building strategy, but it will throw up an extra, easy to create barrier between you and your competitors.
If you have any SEO questions, feel free to email me or call me at 1300 783 301.
