The Powerful Link Myth

Website owners were, and still are, scrambling for the all powerful backward link! They are in belief that a link from a highly ranked site will boost their ranking instantly.

As I have stated many times, you cannot fool the Search Engines. As always, the Search Engines caught up to this tactic of "buying your way to the top" and have since devalued it in their ranking system.

The Proof is in the Pudding

I did a test and purchased a link from a highly ranked, unrelated site. I did not develop any other links, nor did I work hard on building content. Granted the change in Pagerank was amazing - the site jumped from a miserable ranking of 2 to a 6! Wonderful? Not really.

While the all mightly green PageRank bar may have jumped, ranking for keywords did not. The site was still not ranked in the top 30 for any keyterms related to the site.

At the same time . I developed a content rich site and submitted it to the top 5 search engines. I had no inbound, or backlinks, and the results may surprise you.

The first green bar achievement was a respectible 4. But what really made the impact was the site was showing up in the Search Engines for keyterms relevant to the site. Traffic was increasing and the site was being spidered regularly.

Caution:

Don't be fooled by Link Brokers. When links develop naturally usually there is a more even distribution of low power links to high power links. If you buy nothing but high power links that will look abnormal.

This abnormality may cause a red flag with the Search Engines and cause your site not to rank as high. Powerful links do help, but it is far cheaper and more effective to manually build many low power links than to go after a single or few high power links.

Building Rank the Old-Fashioned Way

This is not always true, but generally the less dependant you make your business on search results the more likely search engines are to want to display it. Meaning, if your peers and leaders in your field think your site is informative and worhtwhile, then search engines, eventually, should too.

Focus on business. Make smart business partnerships and friendships that will direct traffic to your site. Even if your ranking in the major search engines drop you will maintain a steady stream of traffic.

Those same partnerships will in turn help build your link popularity and ultimately improve your rankings. At times it is difficult to determine exactly which marketing investments will perform the best (and you are sure to make a few mistakes). It is usually better to use a variety of marketing techniques rather than rely on any single source, especially with how search algorithms can change overnight.

Don't put all your advertising eggs in one marketing basket.