Backlinks Story

Backlinks

One of the most instrumental aids to good SEO is inbound links. Or backlinks. Or referrals. The point is, if you can get people linking to your website, it’s a beautiful thing. When web users see these links and click through to your website, it becomes referral traffic.
Either way, search engines recognize and track these links and increase your site’s rank accordingly. If you’re a great writer/blogger, you can entice others to share or repost your blog links. This is “link bait,” and it’s the ideal of SEO content and links. But you can plant inbound links to your website by leaving comments in others’ blogs, forums, and social groups. Just don’t blatantly self-promote yourself and your site. Social media is more about conversation and sharing helpful content than advertising copy. As in real life, how you present yourself in social media makes a big impact.

It is, however, quite acceptable to mention your latest blog post on your own social channels. And you should always list your website in web directories and digital location-based channels. These are all examples of inbound links. Use them to your advantage.

It may be tempting to share links (two-way) with other organizations. Some SEOs say this is better than nothing, but realize that Google will know and won’t give you much credit for reciprocal links. Rather than two-way links, you want one-way inbound links. An option is to try to get your associations and advertising channels to give you one-way organic inbound links to your site. I always recommend clients get their suppliers, manufacturers, vendors, and so on to place one-way links to their websites.

In fact, this topic drives some SEOs to set up a complex, gray-hat network of linking between sites, to appear to achieve valuable one-way links between their disparate clients. This may look good on paper, but realize that Google spiders, follows, and indexes all these links. These kinds of patterns and SEO “tricks” are what Google is devoted to penalizing as its algorithms grow sophisticated over time.

SEO Ethics and the Hats We Wear

Remember the old Westerns where the good guy dressed in white, the bad guy in black, and Clint Eastwood wore whatever he wanted? Actually, this has nothing to do with Clint Eastwood, but today, white-hat SEOs are purely organic, playing everything by the book. Gray-hat SEOs might try to bend the rules a little here or there. But black-hat SEO comprises the tricks some SEOs use to try to fool the search engines. Black hat often achieves immediate boosts in results, but then gets penalized by search engines. Or sometimes you’ll see significant hills and valleys in analytics—periods of success followed by periods of great drop. Google is continuously rewarding individual content contributors and penalizing SEO tricksters. Either way, do organic content honestly, by the book, writing web content about topics on which you’re an expert. Now if you just like black top hats, that’s okay—like in old, grand Hollywood musicals, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire or something. Dang, that boy looked good in a black top hat.

I’ll give you an example. Black-hat SEO would be spammed content: comments and blog posts spammed across unrelated channels. If you’ve ever blogged, you’ve seen these spam comments or blog posts; they make no sense, and they are full of misspellings, poor grammar, and so on. Or it could possibly be directly copying and optimizing competitors’ content and brand names without permission. 

Many SEO vendors will sign clients and, instead of optimizing the client’s website, they’ll create a web landing page or a new microsite or directory listings for the client on their own server and domain name. They charge the client monthly for these services. They mention this to the client upfront, and will achieve some SEO results for the client (hence it’s not pure black hat). But the client still does not have an optimized website, and if they ever want to stop paying the vendor because they are not achieving new sales or they want to try different marketing tactics, the client is left with zero SEO. So these SEO vendors own their clients down to their red long johns. The clients lose any value they had achieved. Had they just optimized their website correctly, upfront, they could have gotten better SEO results anyway, because Google prefers larger, content-rich websites and prefers them as the primary domain for the owner. The search engines have certainly moved more value in this direction over the years, and I believe the industry will continue to advance in this direction, making that third-party microsite practice more black hat.