You may have noticed that my blog posts don’t tend take the same format as most SEO related blogs . I tend to ramble when something relevant pops into my head and this is one of those times. So today we’re going to think about the “link profile” of your site.
I was reading some notes from a seminar that the one and only Matt Cutts attended. For those of you that don’t know Matt works for Google and has a real insight into the workings of Googles magical algorithm’s. At the end of this seminar Matt was kind enough to do a questions and answers session, Great! A chance for real site owners to quiz a man that works for Google and has actual facts!
As expected the questions are normally along the lines of:-
“why doesn’t my site get more traffic”
“why doesn’t my site rank well”
“what am I doing wrong”
“why does yahoo like me but google doesn’t”
Etc
Etc
When answering Matt would often suggest that these site owners take a look at their link profile.
So this raises a rather obvious question.. what is your sites link profile?
To understand this we first need a basic understanding of Google and the way it determines the importance of a given website and its subsequent position in the search results. Google’s creators recognized a flaw in the way that pre-Google search engines prioritized sites. The primary ranking consideration of early search engines was on-page content. Stuffing pages with keywords would often do the trick and produce great rankings. Google’s creators recognized this flaw and realized that the biggest indication of the quality of a site is the number of external sites that link to it, the theory being that if a lot of external sites want to link into that site then it must be a site of some relevance and quality.
But.. even this had flaws. Site owners very quickly figured out ways to manipulate the search engine rankings. Some more ethical than others. Link farms, link rings etc etc started to appear everywhere effectively generating 1000’s of links into a site as soon as it signed up. Google quickly amended its algorithm’s to offset these tactics.
Following this reciprocal linking became a popular method of boosting link count and search engine placement. A link was a link even from an unrelated site. Google would count them all. Then one day, without warning, all those sites that had enjoyed top positions due to reciprocal linking campaigns plummeted. Yep, you guessed it. Google had figured out a way to devalue mass reciprocal linking and worked that into it’s algorithm.
And so here we are today, in a search engine world where the big G’s pretty smart. Consider Google an individual that had a few problems growing up but is now a stable intelligent adult thats not easily fooled.
So, back to our original question. What is your sites link profile?
When Google considers your sites link profile it now looks at the big picture. It considers every link and takes into account everything I’ve mentioned above. Number of links, quality of links, inbound, outbound, reciprocals, content around link, link relevancy etc. So I hear you say, what’s the magic formula. How do I get a link profile Google likes?
It’s simple all you need is 22.4639% more inbound links than outbound links. If only it were that simple!! I believe the key is to try and be as natural as possible. What we’re trying to do is replicate natural site and link development behavior so as not to raise any alarms at Google HQ. If your worried about what you’ve been doing to try and generate links and in some way feel your approach is unethical than chances are Google is one step ahead of you and your site is a ticking time bomb.
so there you have it.. a link profile. Now all I need to do is get that job at Google so I can figure out what the perfect link profile looks like.
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