Google And Relevance Of Links

By David Andrew Smith

All the literature, articles, experts and e-zines devoted to Search Engine Optimisation inform us that links to websites are graded as to importance by the page rank of the linking site and the relevance of its content to the content on the other site. Reciprocal links are of no importance especially with regard to Google although they are not penalised. The higher the page rank of the linking site the better. So we are constantly berated to seek out these high ranking sites to get them to provide a backlink to our own sites. Often they also intimate how you can go about this but when reading on you are never given a definitive plan of for example how to convince the BBC to link to your own site.

I cannot give any ideas as to how to achieve this either. Even if you did manage to get a backlink from the BBC site to your own website, would the link be considered relevant unless the website also had some connection with news, tv, radio or sport? As apparently Google looks at the overall content and not just the small part where the link is situated. So I personally have stopped trying to achieve such links.

Running a website with a page rank of 4, I am personally inundated with requests from other webmasters to provide them with a reciprocal link. They always use the same standard argument ...'you will appreciate the importance of links to search engine positioning'... . Where have these people been the last two years? I always reply to them positively by refusing the reciprocal link but suggest that I will place a link to them if they can give me a good reasoned argument as to why I should. To date I have had not a single reply. Webmasters would be better off by simply asking for a backlink and not offering a worthless reciprocal link. I am quite happy to accommodate someone who asks nicely with a reasoned argument. So webmasters out there take note.

Returning to the idea of relevant backlinks. The majority of my own backlinks are achieved by writing articles which provide quite reasonable page rank and absolute relevance because I am writing about the content of my website. The only downside to article writing and having the articles widely distributed is the penalty of duplicate content. Google will only take one of the sources and count it as a relevant backlink whilst the majority of the other search engines will often count all the places where the article has been published. Despite this article writing is still the best and easiest way of getting good backlinks. It might however take anything up to six months before Google will recognise this as a backlink.

About the Author:

David Smith is the owner of a contract cleaning company Sparkle Cleaning Services UK Ltd to be found at http://www.wesparkle.co.uk . He has built and runs this site as well as organising the cleaning contracts generated from the website.