The idea that links from other sites to your own, actually aid your site, is a logical one. But can backlinks hurt or harm your ranking?

Most of us seo professionals keenly know what this term means, but for the less geeky it simply means getting links from other sites to your own.

When this whole thing started, this was done by exchanging links between sites, and this was acceptable for a while but the search engines soon began to devalue these reciprocal efforts because too many of the reciprocal links were contrived and not natural.

The word “Spam” is known by some as that cheap meat in a can, but in internet lingo it is also known as the process whereby a few tech savvy individuals attempt to gain unfair advantage by flooding areas of the internet with their own commercial resource.

As an example, some marketers send out unsolicited blog comments to thousands of open blogs in an attempt to gain back links. Some made hundreds of real but content-less webpages/sites with links back to their own – not the phrase “their own” – commercial products – hence the need for objective PageRank and PageTrust. In those early days, the search engines were not looking at these items such as which reciprocal links were owned by the same organization or which chain of anchored links were with the same ISP. In order to stop spammers, this information is considered carefully used by the search engines as it is rather important for determining exactly who the spammers are.

It is said that successful backlinking depends very heavily on the keywords one chooses – traditionally, this has been where most linking efforts have failed.

Why? We can’t specifically tell others to use such and such an anchor text in their link to us. And in direct contradiction to what you might be reading around the net, therein lies a big part of the problem, right?

Also, since as a casual reader, you are not likely to be an expert on long tail keywords, you are going to most logically try to pick the keywords having the most traffic. Is this a mistake? A brand new online entity, even after being indexed by Yahoo or most search engines, typically has no chance at ranking on its chosen keywords for many months if not years.

Ergo, have we looked at a potentially time wasting effort here?

The potential problems don’t stop there. Initially a new html or htm page has a Google Rank of N/A. Then after its indexed, typically 0 where Zero is not good and 10 is the best. Although some may argue this while a new page with N/A or O as its rank can have a freshness quotient that can help it positively, in most search engines, its zero which is evidence of lack of backlinks will assuredly work negatively against it.

Exceptions abound however and if the newly created page is sitting on a very popular web2.0 social network property like squidoo or craigslist, bebo or scribd to name a few then it won’t be penalized as much just because its current pagerank or credibility level appears to be a zero.

And as some will be quick to point out, it is thought that new pages on foundation sites such as those with a PageRank of 5 or above, inherently acquire some of the PageRank or PageTrust of the site that they sit on.

Technical babble – the question really is – What really, does one do ?

Google’s time worn advice, go back to fundamentals, create good and be innovative. They would recommend strongly that we even create “link-bait” that will cause others to want to link to you.And that’s inherently a great idea if you have any idea what this link-bait thing means. Ignoring Google’s advice is always done at your own peril, however I urge you to examine the issues involved in creating link-bait more deeply. Calculate whether you really have 8-9 months that it takes to consistently create new articles almost daily, and to put out such a ferocious amount of intensely likable content in one spot that would cause people to consistently put a link to that page from their own – If the answer is no then you understand why most of us will never ever intentionally create link-bait.

There has to be ways around this. What should one do?

Look around this blog, there are myriad articles on link-bait and seo tools.

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