SEO Tips: When is a Link not a Link?

When a Link Became a Link (the back-story):

About 4-5 years ago, SEO started to become a mainstream term in the business community. Certainly any business that relied upon the internet for a large proportion of its sales started to investigate what SEO was and how they could harness it to improve their turnover.

Those that could afford it hired a professional to work their magic (or what seemed like magic to mesmerised customers, damn it was easier back then), but those that couldn't afford it started signing up to SEO newsletters and forums and trying to do it themselves.

The core thing that everyone learned was the links were important. Many companies started distributing press releases round various sites in order to grow their back-link numbers, and link-exchanges became very popular. It then became apparent that one way links were better, and subsequently people began three way linking (I'll link to your page on that site from this page on my site, and you link to my page from that page on your site).

All those tactics worked well for a time. They were especially beneficial for building PageRank™, and positions would be gained for low competition terms fairly quickly, while highly competitive terms took ages.

When a Link Became Not a Link

This led to some businesses outsourcing their link-building to Asian companies (we've all had the emails). People became so obsessed with volume of links, and failed to see that the quality of those links was far more important than the quantity, and would continue to become more important as time progressed.

But the worst thing about these link-building campaigns outsourced was/is not that they did not/don't work in the desired way. The worst thing is that they can end up having a massively negative effect on the site's positions and PageRank™, and when that happens the negative effect lasts for a very long time after the link-building stops.

Before I explain why (and to save myself from a tirade of retribution) I better say that I have never and will never outsource my link-building, nor will I ever look into those offering the services in any detail. So for all I know there could be some very good Asian link-builders, who build the kind of targeted and high quality links that they claim to build.

That said: the ones I have seen have given those who hire them thousands of links. Good right? Wrong! Thousands of links from things like Asian dating sites and sites and directories which have nothing to do with the subject matter of the site.

Why a Link is Not a Link, When it is Not a Link

The reason why these links end up doing lasting damage is because of a thing called trust rank; the trustworthiness of your site being determined by the search engines, using an algorithm which judges how spammy your site is, based on how many spam sites link to you and how many you link to (all of them of course being judged on their spam levels by the same measure). That is a very simple explanation of trust rank, there is a much better one here.

Trust rank has become more important to your overall site rank as time has progressed. And it is for that reason that methods like submitting articles have gotten less effective. Especially using sites which do not have an editorial procedure, because these have been used by spammers, which means they link to spam, which means a link from those sites then becomes damaging.

So, in short the answer to the question of when is a link not a link is: when that link comes from a site that has a low trust rank, and subsequently brings your trust rank down, adversely affecting the overall ranking of your website.

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