Some Link Building myths cleared

Link building is the trump card in SEO. As I have stated on many occasions, a wise and clever link building strategy can take care of a stupid on site optimized site. So even if everything on your site went wrong. Having a carefully planned link building strategy will rescue you and push you up the SERPs more than a good on site optimization strategy.

The only problem is that link building can be a bit more costly. I would never suggest you to buy links from other sites, but if it is essential, try to source some good relevant links from related sites on the same domain space.

However, there are still some myths regarding link building that still exist, and people a bit scary or skeptical when talking about it. I would tell them that link building is nothing to worry about, in fact if carefully planned it can work you wonders. Let’s discuss some common myths on link building and why shouldn’t you worry about link building.

1. Link building is not just about numbers.
   Link building is not about getting the maximum number of links. There is a widespread belief that the more links you get, the better. Well that’s true but it doesn’t mean that you can beat an existing top rank guy on the SERPs ONLY by having more number of links than them. Many a imes, when I talk to SEOs and clients, many of them first counts the number of links to their competitor, and says that we got to gather more links than them to beat them. And I cannot completely agree. Go to point 2.
2. Less links but more power
   In my opinion, to beat an existing guy, you don’t need to gather more links than him. But you should collect more “meaningful” links. I’d say “Power” links. Power links even though lesser in number, by their value and authority will give you stronger and bigger pushes up the SERPs. So essential, if your competitor has 100 backlinks, then it’s possible to even have 20 power links and get a better position than him on the SERPs.
3. How old are you ? I mean the links.
   Another crucial factor is that the age of links does matter while counting the backlinks. Sometimes, people asks me, why can’t you set up 100 blogs on blogger.com or wordpress.com and then link all of them to my main website? Wouldn’t that be like 100 backlinks for free? Well, I wish if it was easier that way. It works perfect if you had a blogger.com blog running for a longer time and you had decent PR on it. But you can’t just create 100 of them on one fine day and get links from them. The reason is that they dont have the age advantage. Unlike in real life, the older the links are the better. So it makes sense to gather links from an aged domain (check with webarchive.org) rather than a new one.
4. Link boosters
   Now, to help fight tight competition, we have the link boosters. They are “special” links that can be sourced from exclusive domains. Like .edus, .govs, and .orgs. Well, since this Google guy is so clever, he thinks that links from a .gov and .edu are hard to source, and if some one did link to you, that means you are likely to be an authority, just like the way you are. And they are partially right. .Gov sites are government authorizations and they are not generally willing for link sales. So once you have their links that’s most likely because your site is relevant to the content.
   Google also should be knowing that many of them has blogs. I’ll stop it there.
5. Just any text link won’t help. Why?
   I wish if it was that way. But the problem is that gathering links from any source just doesn’t matter. It even becomes like a no link at all situation. Valid links should always come from contextual content and related sites. So if you want a link to a dating site, you source a link from a relationship site.
6. Contextual links?
   And also it’s important that the links should be contextual. NO sitewide links, single anchor text links. They are OK, but what’s of value to you is contextual ones that are more like a suggestion from the webmaster, or recommendation to visit your site, naturally.
7. Google v/s Yahoo v\s MSN
   Finally, if you have been checking Google for backlinks, then you’d be having a tough and confusing situation. Google (deliberately) does not show all links to your site. But Yahoo and MSN are more fair on this and will show you more links. So don’t check your backlinks on Google and fret over it. Yahoo is better than the big G in some aspects.

Hope it all makes sense.

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