The SEO Blog

As someone who is interested in Search Engine Optimisation, you have probably heard how important back links are as part of your SEO Campaign.  When a search user enters their criteria into the search engine the search engine has to be able to return the best results to gain the trust of the user.  It does this by evaluating which pages relate to that query and which are most important.

Importance is determined by ‘votes’ and each link back to a page is seen for a vote for that page.  However, links do not just ‘come’ to sites.  You have to publish great content that people want to link to, so you need to shout about it (try using social media channels such as Digg and Twitter to start with).

One thing to consider is that you get links from relevant web pages.  Dont just go buying links from ‘link farms’.  Carefully source your web sites / pages and if possible get them from pages with relevant content to your own.  Naturally, links are valuable so dont expect people to just give them away!

Moving forward, each link to your page, or vote, passes a part of the page rank of the origin.  So if you get a link back from a web page with a high page rank (and few links) you will get a higher slice of the source ranking.  If your source page is cluttered with links then you will get a smaller slice of the pie.

However, if only it was as simple as just getting a slice of the pie.  There are now two other factors that Google has thrown into the mix.

However, it has gotten more complicated by the introduction of 2 new factors:

1. Relevance. If the link comes from a site that is on the same topic as the publisher’s site (or a closely related topic), that link is worth more than a links that comes from a site with an unrelated topic.

2. Authority. It is generally accepted that search engines attempt to measure how much they trust a site. If a site is highly trusted, its vote will count for more than if it is not that trusted.

These factors are the two single most important items you need to consider when building your back links.  Back links from bad neighbourhoods may provide you with a quick fix, but it wont be long until you find your site sliding down the listings.

So why does link building matter?  Done correctly, It helps your site gain page rank, and most importantly trust from the right neighbourhoods.

After doing some searhes on our clients keywords over the last couple of days I have noticed that Google seems to be returning some strange results.   On initial inspection it does seem like results from the US are getting mixed up with results from the UK.  This is having a negative effect on some of our sites but positive effect on others.

I have read numerous blog posts over the last couple of days that tell us that Google have made some changes to the way that back links with the nofollow tag affect Page Rank.   Not only have changes been made, but Google have not been forthcoming with any real communication or response to the changes.

• A large number of people queried the head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, about the issue. Responses ranged from “no comment” to “the PR team would like me to stay away from that.”
• Another member of Google’s team noted that PageRank Sculpting on unimportant pages like “register,” “login,” “privacy policy,” etc. is OK and shouldn’t hurt your site.
• A great many webmasters and SEOs are still shocked by the announcement because as recently as the last few days, they’ve still been seeing positive effects when employing the tactic.

So why have changes been made?

Im summary Google is getting pretty fed up with Page Rank sculpting (creative distribution of page rank around the pages of your web site).  Basically Google wants non-advanced web site owners to stop screwing around with their link graph and stay away from excessively using nofollow in ways that hurt indexing and relevance.

Have you seen changes to your SERP or Page Rank in the last week?