Any webmaster that is worth their salt knows that back links are the fruit of their business. When you have website links that are pointing back to your site, you’ll raise up the ranks of Google. It really is that simple – or is it?
>For many years site owners have been concentrating on building up fast website links back to their site in the hopes that Google would notice the quantity and reward them with a higher ranking. Link farms were born where people would pay for links, and if you had the money, you could end up doing better than another site that didn’t have the money to put into these link farms.
This went on for a while until Google said enough is enough and started to penalize paid links. At this point, the quality of website links needed to be addressed. It was no longer a race to the finish for a quantity of links but rather a careful balance of quality links and a quantity of them.
Nowadays there is a lot of debate about website links. While it is widely known that back links to a site will help it get noticed by Google and other search engines, it is not clear how Google judges the value of links.
On the one hand, you’ll see a site that is sitting at number one in Google with only a few links while its competitors with thousands of links rest below it. When examining these website links you notice that they are coming from authority sites with a high page rank. This will certainly raise a few eyebrows and make you think twice about the quality of the links that you are getting.
On the other hand, you might see a site at the top of Google for another keyword that has thousands of garbage links, (ones from directory sites etc.), while other sites with high quality links sit underneath it. You are left scratching your head and wonder about this mysterious monster named Google.
The debate is under way as to the weight that Google gives to the website links it sees. There is evidence that both quantity and quality are very valuable when you are trying to get a site up to the top of the search engines. Your best bet is to combine quality links with a quantity of back links to cover all of your bases.
Image by Dirk Wouters from Pixabay