Link Building: Remember To Keep It Simple!

There's a great post from Eric Enge on Search Engine Land today as this is something that we at Regency Interactive run into all of the time! It's also similar to the K.I.S.S rule for design except this one is for SEO. Here are some of Eric's simple explanations to common questions that we at Regency Interactive are asked every day.

1. Why link building is important: "Link building is important because links behave like votes for your site. The more votes you have the better your rankings will be. This is why Amazon ranks more highly than other sites selling books (e.g. Joe's Book Store)."

2. All links are not created equal: "Search engines value the relevance of the link highly. Links from unrelated sites don't hurt you, but they don't help nearly as much as links from a relevant site. Also, a link from Amazon counts more than a link from Joe's book store, because Amazon itself has more links pointing to it.

3. Why link building is an ongoing activity: You must continually do link building because at least one of your competitors will do so. It does not help you that much to climb to the top of the mountain and then rest, because your competitor can still catch up with you and pass you.

4. Why search engines have canonical issues: It is entirely possible to serve up different content at yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com, and it's possible for that content to be controlled by different people. As a result, search engines need to treat them as separate pages, and this makes one version a duplicate of the other.

5. Why 301s are the preferred redirect: 301 is the only server side redirect which is defined as "Content Moved Permanently". All the major search engines therefore treat this as a signal to pass through links and history from the old page to the new page. Other forms of redirects do not pass link juice from the old page to the new page.

6. What search engines do with duplicate content: Search engines only want to list one copy of a piece of content in their search results. So they pick one version of the content to include in their results for a particular query.

7. Why search engines care about duplicate content: If a user clicks on one search result and sees a given article, but it is not what they are looking for, the search engine is not helping them by showing more copies of the same content. Diversity in search results helps search quality.

8. How is duplicate content defined?: Exact copies are duplicate content, of course, but so are near copies. Common menus and boilerplate on a site are ignored, and the page's unique content is evaluated to determine the degree of similarity with other pages. Similarly exceeding a given threshold is considered duplicate.

9. Why buying links is bad: Search engines want to count links to your site as editorial votes for its quality. A purchased link is compensated, and therefore likely not editorial. While discovering paid links algorithmically may be hard, your competitor can spot them visually and report you.

Hopefully some of these will be useful to you too when you are asked these same questions day after day. Just remember to keep it simple so they understand the basis of your answer. It will make your life easier! His article continues here.