Linkbuilding is, was and probably always will be the single hardest part of SEO. Without links, your site just won’t acquire any equity, and without that equity you will almost certainly never rank. If you’re in niche, and beaver away at your content for a few years, you’ll probably do OK eventually, but for most commercial properties you need to spend money to acquire the links you need to outrank your competitors. It’s a tough business, the reasons for which can be summarised as follows:

  • Most websites in your market will actually be competitors – and they certainly ain’t going to link to you.
  • The number of people who actually blog about your kind of product is probably pretty minimal, and they won’t always be motivated to either write positive things about you – let alone link to you.
  • Special interest sites that deal with your product or market are often zealously protective of their perceived impartiality and police links from their properties with a Spanish Inquisition style fervour.
  • People that do link to you are just as likely to use phrases like “here” and “this website” to link to you than use keyword anchor text. While this adds to the overall power of your domain, Google’s use of anchor text as a major factor in relevancy means that you get only limited juice from such a link.
  • Google “officially” don’t want you to buy links

Which means…

…that your options to get links are pretty limited. Naturally, this has led to the creation of whole infrastructures of websites that exist purely as a means for people to build links. While the search engines like to bitch about this fact, and spend millions finding ways to detect this stuff I don’t have much sympathy. They were the ones who opted to place lots of weight on links in the first place and if they couldn’t see that people would try to manipulate that fact… well, they should’ve gone to SpecSavers.

Does the internet really benefit from content free ‘SEO directories’? Does the world really need another automated blog network with low-value content that only exists to generate keyword links? Of course not, but that’s the battleground where SEOs and the search engines are met. Which brings us to the point of this already far too rambly piece of drivel. How do Google find these ’spurious’ links. Much of the shit stuff is easily identifiable through algorithmical means.
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Detectable footprints like this are easily found and discounted. If you use footprints to search for link opportunities, or merely follow competitor backlinks, then Google can do exactly the same. There’s probably a load you can think of yourself.

Avoiding the obvious

When you’re looking to build volume links, you’re going to need to do some of the above anyway – if only to mask the real power links you’re building. If you’ve got a backdoor into a tasty property that can feed you a fat, clean PR8 link then you don’t want the world and his dog beating on the same door. If some schmuck can find your good shit with Yahoo Site Explorer then they’re going to trail all over the carpet with their spammy efforts and your good work is right up the swanny before you know it.

You’ll also want your site’s link profile to look more ‘natural’ to Google anyway – directory submissions and blog comments are part of the web’s infrastructure and any site worth it’s salt will appear there so a little judicious action in that regard keeps your site’s link numbers ticking over a bit and appearing like the kind of thing Joe Soap would do anyway. What you don’t want is that stuff raising a flag somewhere and drawing Google’s attention to other things you might be doing.