The Torrid Tale Of The Ever Changing Google Algorithm

Optimizing any site to promote it within Google search engine results pages can prove to be an ongoing saga. After countless months of optimizing, tweaking, linking, and improving you might be lucky enough to find your site listed at the top of the results page. If you do then we all hail you and you have the unarguable right to give yourself a firm pat on the back. Problems can arise, though, when Google perform another of their seemingly uncountable algorithm updates. Boom, your site suddenly drops from top spot to page 53 of the results. After a week of crying, shouting, and screaming the results begin to settle and your site once again finds itself heading towards the dizzy heights of page one.

Again, this is a slight over-exaggeration in most cases. Google do update their algorithms because they attempt to prevent the unethical few that we have all come to know and love as black hat SEOs from gaining that coveted top spot. In fairness to Google, this can't be an easy battle. They make a change, the black hat SEOs change their methods to match. Google again make some changes in a bid to counteract these new methods and, what do you know, the black hat SEOs pop up again with some new, equally cunning ploy to steal the top positions from the rest of us Google abiding promoters. And so, the algorithms change once again.

An Introduction To Our Hero - The Inbound Link

However, since time immemorial Google has loved the inbound link in an almost incestuous fashion. A quick browse through most result pages will throw up results that you might find to be a freak or just completely wrong. Those sites contain little or no mention of the keyword, or search phrase, in question and yet they're appearing above your impeccably optimized page. Looking beyond the search results and toward a link popularity tool you will inevitably find that the site in question has an excellent link profile.

Why Use A Link Building Service To Fight Your Battles?

Google deem an inbound link as a tick, a gold star, and a big bag of brownie points for your page. If that inbound link also contains the aforementioned keywords as anchor text then you should expect great things in the future. If you're looking for the single most important Google SEO factor then inbound links are what you are looking for. The size of the tick or the amount of brownie points that are found in your special bag are determined by just how beneficial an inbound link is.

It's Not The Size Of Your Links

Quality is, on the whole, much more important than quantity. Reciprocal links were once the weapon of the Webmaster looking for Google acceptance, but they now place less weight on a reciprocal link as they do on a one-way link. Google want to promote a natural or organic Internet network. They don't want to see links that have been traded, in any way, and instead want to see sites gifted a link because of the value that they offer to visitors.

Google Battling Techniques

In reality, of course, gaining organic links is not a simple process. You need to have traffic before you have any hope of gaining organic links and so it's necessary to look elsewhere. The technique that I, as a Google battler, prefer is the use of article submissions. This can be a submission to article directories in the hope that every man and his site will pick it up, or submission to individual high quality websites. It isn't important. What is important is the degree of control that article submission offers.

Commanding A Regiment Of Inbound Links

Submitting an article makes me the boss, or General if you prefer, of my links to an excellent extent and the search engines certainly don't seem to have a problem with it (yet). I can control the page content, the anchor text, and in the case of individual submissions I can control the quality (dare I say it - PageRank) of the site or page that links to me.

Fighting On An Even Battlefield

Page content is important. Gaining a link from a page that is based on a topic irrelevant to your own is near useless. Even ensuring that the text immediately surrounding your link and the anchor text are relevant does not offer what I look for in a linking page. I want complete (or as near as possible to complete) relevancy.

Don't Camouflage Your Links

Control over anchor text is vital. The anchor text of a link is the visual element that readers can see, it's the section of the HTML that is viewed and clicked by readers, and it is the section of a link that many inexperienced promoters get completely wrong. When you start a link building or article submission campaign it is important to determine the keywords you will be targeting and include these keywords in the hypertext of the link and preferably at least once or twice in the article itself. Most article directories allow for two links so use them both for different keywords, preferably pointing to different pages of your site.

Always Be Planning Your Next Inbound Link Campaign

The final factor regarding linking that is vitally important is that you keep going. Even when you reach the top spots for your most competitive keywords you have to keep plugging away. The second you let it drop you can guarantee that another site with another eager Webmaster at the helm is chomping at the bit ready to take over the mantle of Google number one.

Only Fools Rush In

New websites should always take care not to build too many links too quickly. Google do see this as meaning you employ an underhand method of link building because new sites typically cannot muster up thousands of links in their first few days. Take your time, submit one article to several directories, and then wait to be indexed. Using this technique you will get indexed relatively quickly and after a couple of weeks you can start to post articles with a little more regularity.

Conclusion And A Little Ambush Prevention

Inbound linking is potentially (I use that word only to try and prevent the ambush of criticism from others) the most important aspect of Google SEO. A good link profile with a reasonable number of inbound links from high quality, and relevant websites can make up for under optimized or even un-optimized website content. What it can't make up for is the use of other black hat SEO techniques. Do everything above board and it is less likely that you will become one of the anti-Google druids; those that spend the rest of their online life frequenting message boards and blogs relaying the tired tale of how they were once an online millionaire before Google destroyed them.


Matt Jackson is the website content copywriter for WebWiseWords. As well as providing insightful tales of epic optimization battles he also offers his unique link building service to anyone that is even remotely interested and several who aren't.