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Google, Site Indexing, and Link Building Part II
By HHI Golf Guy | June 2, 2006
By now must of you know that Google has begun to purge what they consider garbage pages from their index. And as it so happens, many of these happen to be links pages. Some site owners have claimed that they have seen their pages dropped and then show up again later within a week or so. (I’m not too sure about those statements - the site owner would need to make sure that they were checking the same Google datacenter each time they look for the pages.)
Why is Google purging link/resource pages? While there may be a few reasons, I still believe that the primary reason is to prevent link spam and link bombing. Dropping these pages is probably the easiest way to accomplish this task. This also means that natural links (links within real content pages) will be the driving force in future link building strategies.
The bad news with all of these changes is that in order to rank well on Google you will need to re-think your link building strategies. The good news is that almost everyone else is in the same boat.
I still believe that the best way to build links is by building a mini-article directory on a sub domain of your web site. But let’s face it - building and maintaining a mini article directory and having to write your own mini articles is a time consuming task. And since 99.99% of all web site owners are lazy and looking for a quick fix it will be a tough task to accomplish.
But there is another way to build links that should also work well - if you focus on exchanging links only with high quality web sites and you take a more conservative approach to link building. Instead of creating link exchange pages we will incorporate the strategy of using a limited number of text only links on the content pages of our web sites (not including our home page).
How will this work? When we send out link requests we will offer a text only link on one of our regular pages (for example, a community information page). The link will be placed somewhere in a navigation sidebar of the page or in the footer of the page (but not at the very bottom of the page - that’s too easy for a search engine to spot as an obvious link building attempt). Heck, I may even build a few DIV boxes and place them in the middle of a page.
As I stated earlier, we will be very conservative in these link exchanges and place only 2-3 reciprocal links on each page. Furthermore, we will try and keep these links categorized by city, county, or state. Here’s an example of how the links might look:
Once again, our plan is to be very conservative in our link building efforts. I believe that if you start placing 4, 5, or more links on a page it will trip a red flag with Google and your content page may be de-indexed just like your link pages were de-indexed. We’re also going to stay very focused on our link exchanges. Real estate sites will swap with other real estate sites, travel sites with other travel sites, etc. We will probably also throw in some non-recip links into the mix (i.e. Realtor.com or with other real estate SEO’s that have multiple sites).
One thing that we have always done in our link building program is restrict our link exchanges to sites that meet our own quality guidelines. There are already 9 or 10 items in all that we use to evaluate a potential link partner, and we will probably add a few more. Above all, we stay away from sites that used generic content - especially template web sites.
Once again, I cannot stress enough that you cannot go overboard and put 6-10 links on a page. In fact, we’re not planning to use this link method on all of our pages. My plan is to limit it to 50%-60% of all content pages. If I need to build more links after that I will need to add more content to the site, then build additional links.
FWIW, I don’t think that this site wide link building will be nearly as effective as the mini-article/sub domain route. But I also know that I need to incorporate a link building program that has more mass appeal than the mini article pages. But once I build enough mini-article pages for a web site I will drop the sitewide links.
BTW, what should you do with your current link pages? If they are quality, categorized link pages I say that you can leave them be. Yahoo and MSN will still give you credit for those links.
Topics: General SEO, Real Estate SEO |
2 Responses to “Google, Site Indexing, and Link Building Part II”
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July 1st, 2006 at 10:17 pm
Great post!
I just wanted to check in to see if you had an update to this post. Have you done this for some of your clients? Has it worked well? Have you had good results in getting people to participate?
Thanks!
July 3rd, 2006 at 4:37 pm
Hi Nickie!
We have been running test sites for about one year now and have had very good results. Right now we are in the process of converting all of our client sites to the new sub domain method. We’re also working on a web site for one-way real estate links and article exchanges. In the meantime, I found a forum run by Kathleen Allardyce that is a meeting spot for those that want to exchange articles. You can view her forum at http://rearticleswap.com/index.php.