Slightly Shady SEO | Blackhat is Back, Baby.

A lot of people have very conflicting views about backlinks, and what indicates quality. Here, I’m going to outline the reality of backlinks. What’s good, what’s not, and what doesn’t matter.

1. Quantity, quantity, quantity. Screw everyone who says you need to have only high PR links.
   1. A big quantity rush beats a few high PR links any day.
   2. Make sure growth rate is sustainable for at least a couple weeks.
2. NoFollow is better than not there
   1. Anchor Text can still affect your ranking, although link juice is not directly passed. (according to my test)
3. Site-wide links are MUCH better than one page.
4. The more outbound links on a site, and the less content, the less the links are worth. Which means a PR7 directory is not worth near as much as any other high PR link. Directories suck.
5. Paid links are a last resort. There’s MILLIONS of places to link drop on the web. If you could make more from a paid link than the cost, then people would just use the links themselves.
6. Never pay for a link that’s for traffic only. No link provides enough traffic to pay for it.
7. Look up “Spam Mass” in wikipedia. You’ll be glad you did.
8. Keep your backlink anchor text relatively the same. It should be your primary search term. I have some evidence that your benefit is calculated as a percentage of your anchor text being XYZ.
9. You do not want links from websites whose IPs are the same as your server, or on the same C-Block (x.x.x.0-x.x.x.255)

I’ll post something more advanced later. This is just for the beginners out there.

Posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 10:50 am in the category:backlinks, google, seo. Comment RSS 2.0 feed. Comment it , or trackback this post.