Building links used to be all about just getting a backlink and that was it. It didn't really matter how or from where, so long as you were getting them, you were golden. That was a long time ago, and as with everything on the internet, things quickly evolved. A few years ago, link farms were all the rage, of course they were not called link farms back then. They worked fine, until webmasters found a way to abuse the system and get thousands of links from them overnight. After that came the link directories, which unlike link farms were a little more sophisticated and organized. Link directories are a great way to get your homepage spidered quickly, maybe even grab a visitor or two if the Directory is of high quality and your link is very attractive. The effectiveness of link directories has dwindled dramatically due to the many automated software systems and sites that'll submit your link to thousands of them overnight. It's just not what SE's would call a high quality link... Just recently, link exchanges or reciprocal link building sites and programs were all the rage. Give me a link and I'll give you one right back. When the SE's caught on to them, they evolved into 3 way link exchanges, I'll give you a link, you give them a link and they'll give me a link. Seemed like the perfect solution, and to this day still works quite well to get links to your Homepage... All of these systems have three inherent problems in the eyes of the Search Engines: 1. They create links to your homepage only 2. They are systems easily manipulated by the webmasters 3. They provide very little value, if any, to the end user, in this case the visitor It was inevitable that, eventually, the Search Engine's would have to do something about this, they would have to find a better way to qualify, justify and rank backlinks. After all, links are the backbone of the internet. The result of this, changed the way the Major Search Engines look at the links on your pages and more importantly, the backlinks pointing to your pages. They took a 180 degree turn alltogether! Instead of looking at the way the webmaster had optimized their site or what links were coming and going, the Search Engine's turned their focus to what the end users' behavior was when clicking on or following those links! The main indicator of quality, relevancy and validity of the links now lies in the end users behavior. When looked at from the Search Engines' point of view, this makes perfect sense. Here's the logic behind the madness and why the SE's trust this information far more :) To begin with, the webmaster has little to no control over the end users actions, so this is very unbiased and raw feedback. Let's walk through a typical scenario. A visitor is on your site, maybe the homepage or maybe an inner page, they are interested in the content on your site and they spy a link which catches their eye they click on the link and it takes them to another page... Here is where it get's interesting! There's only two things they can do: 1. Stay on that site 2. Leave that site Based on this behavior, the SE's can tell instantly if the link was good or bad. If the visitor immediately closes the new page or backspaces away, the Search Engines can make certain assumptions. For example they might assume the link was irrelevant to the page it pointed to, they might assume that the anchor text used in the link was deceitful. One way or the other, that particular visitor was not happy with that link, so the SE may not give that link any weight. However, if the visitor decided to stay on the page after following the link, the picture is entirely different. Now the SE starts to analyze why they may have stayed on the page. They will look first at the page the link was on and compare it to the anchor text of the link for relevancy. Then they will look at the page the link was pointing to - the page the user is currently on - and compare that to both the link anchor text and the previous page. Next they will look at the users behavior while on the new page, how long they stay on the page, if they go back to the previous page, or if they follow a link within the current page, and if so, is it an internal link or an external link... When all is said and done, the result from this extensive research will ultimately determing whether or not this link is valid and what weight it should be given. The more weight the link is given, the higher overall ranking the page will receive in the search engine for the terms researched. You may ask, "How can the SE's possibly get all of this data?" Easy, there's several tools that Google and other SE's use to follow you around the web, like Toolbars, certain Browsers and of course, Google Analytics. As of this writing, it is estimated that almost 60% of all webmasters are using Google Analytics to gather user specific data on their sites. Does this mean you should not use Google Analytics? Of course not! As a matter of fact, we strongly recommend that you DO use it. It's a great way to see what your visitors are doing on your site :) The very valuable data! But at the same time, you should know how to use this data and tool to your advantage. The take away lesson from this article should be: When building links, always think like your visitor and not like a webmaster trying to get pagerank. Build high quality, relevant backlinks that point to content on pages that will be useful to your visitor and will make you look like an authority for providing it. These are called "Deep Links" and they go from an inner page on your site to the inner page of a completely different but very relevant site. Don't worry about the small percentage of visitors that you may lose to these links, if done properly, link building will increase your overall traffic by tenfold or more! In another article, we will discuss why it is necessary to have links on your pages, as opposed to the popular belief that by doing so you will leak pagerank, it's not true...
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