February 11th, 2010 by Avvo Admin

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After my last post, “6 Questions to Ask a Potential SEO Firm,” someone asked for elaboration on link building.  Specifically, when you ask a potential SEO firm for details about their link building practices, how do you know whether it’s a good or bad answer? Read on to learn how to tell good links from bad.

When interviewing potential SEO firms, one important thing to ask them is how they build links, because proper link building is both crucial and difficult.  To evaluate this, a great way is to ask for a sample link report showing the links they’ve built for another client.  This will allow you to see the actual links they’ve built instead of speaking hypothetically.  Once you’ve got the links in hand, evaluate them based on these factors:

1)    Do any humans visit the web pages that link out?

Many web pages exist only to host links.  Sometimes these are called “link farms.”  These pages can appear as page full of links; other times they can appear as blogs or articles written in broken English.  Regardless, if common sense tells you the page is something no human would visit, then there’s a pretty good chance it only exists to manipulate Google.  That said, pages only containing links aren’t all bad.  For example, established directories like DMOZ or Yahoo can be helpful, but these should not be the only types of websites you get links from.

2)    Are the links do follow?

Because Google counts links as votes, it had to come up with a way for people to link to websites without it counting as an endorsement.  For example, let’s say you link to a website because it’s a scam.  Your link could actually help its Google rankings.  To prevent this, Google came up with the “no follow” tag.  This is a piece of code that tells Google not to count the link as an endorsement.  The code for no follow links is not normally visible.  However, plugins like Search Status for Firefox will highlight all links on a page that are no follow, allowing you to easily see them.   No follow links will not help your SEO.

3)    What is the PR (PageRank) of the pages with the links?

Google gives every page a PR score of 0-10.  You can see this in your browser if you download the Google Toolbar.  This score has been widely criticized as inaccurate or even meaningless, but it’s one of the only ways to know how important Google thinks a page is.  The higher the PR of pages, the better.  Keep in mind that every page of a website has its own PageRank.  Sometimes unscrupulous link builders will claim to get you “PR 5 links,” when it’s really the homepage of the site that is PR 5, and the page that links to you is a PR 0.  Also keep in mind that links from low PR pages aren’t harmful; they’re just not as valuable as higher PR links.

4)    Are the websites/pages that link out relevant?

If you’re a law firm and all your links come from sites about cooking and polar bears, that could cause Google to devalue the links.  Google is very adamant about relevancy.  In practice, links from less-than-relevant sites can still help you, but striving for links from relevant sites is a good goal.

5)    Are the links violating any of Google’s guidelines?

If you violate Google’s guidelines, you risk being penalized or even kicked out of Google completely.  There are many ways to build links that violate Google’s guidelines, but here are three big ones:

-    Comment spam: this is posting nonsense or irrelevant comments with a link into the comment field of blogs or forums.
-    Buying links: this is paying someone to link to you instead of it happening naturally.
-    Excessive reciprocal linking: this is “link to me and I’ll link to you” type arrangements.  There is nothing wrong with two related sites linking to each other if it’s helpful to visitors, but Google frowns on link trading solely for the purpose of manipulating rankings.

6) How risky are the link building tactics?

Some variations of the above activities may fall into gray areas.  For example, is sponsoring a charity that links to you buying a link? Or what about reciprocal links from websites that are sort of related to you, but not really? For this reason Google’s rules are anything but black and white.  It’s more a continuum of risk (for details, check out this great video).

This is why an SEO firm should be prepared to discuss different link building tactics and the level of risk each entails.  Some firms take big risks, others play in the gray area, and some are risk free.  Find out what you’re comfortable with and where the SEO firm stands.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 4:45 pm by Avvo Admin and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.