Despite what you may believe, high PR link building is not a strategy of the bygone era. Instead, it is still considered to be a very crucial component of most comprehensive link building strategies being used by search engine optimizers today and it helps your website to maximize its potential with regard to Google’s PageRank formula. However, as you may already be well aware of, Google is, by far, the most dynamic place when it comes to the evolution of established techniques and systems. As a result of a recently approved patent by this search engine giant, you will need to make some serious modifications to your link building strategy. The patent, titled ‘Ranking documents based on user behavior and / or feature data’, was filed by Google in 2004 and approved last year and entails a whole new and extremely elaborate PageRank formula. Here is a much more detailed explanation of this new patent and how it will impact the success of your link building campaign.
The most basic change that you will have to make will have to be with regard to how you view and understand the concept of a link. If you consider the existing concepts of link building, you will quickly realize that search engine optimizers treat all links as equal because Google treats every link as equal. This means that a link of extremely small font and inconsequential color being placed in some obscure part of a page that is completely irrelevant to the target page is equal to a link of a very large font size and prominent color placed in a page that is considered to be the best in the industry that the target page deals with. In simpler terms, whether you put a link that has no probability of being clicked or you put a link that invites users to click, it is all the same. As per the patent mentioned above, the newer PageRank formula is much more advanced than the old monolith that was unilateral and simple. The new formula takes into account, in a much more elaborate way, the concept of ‘reasonable surfer’. This means that a link that is more likely to be linked by a user would be given more weight in the big scheme of things i.e. the PageRank formula. In practical terms, this means the following changes in your high PR link building strategy:
1. Comments on forums and blogs:
A link in the comments or blogs will have to be extremely relevant to the source page and the target page. This means that if you are dealing with dog leashes, then you cannot have a link on a gaming page because the two subjects are vastly different, that would be a link building mistake. Furthermore, the relevance of your link placement also matters. For instance, if you have a link on dog leashes then your anchor text needs to conform to it as well or the link would not receive enough weight by Google. Generic forum posts and blog comments have their place in the big scheme of things, but with high PR link building in mind you would do well to be very specific of your usage.
2. Social Bookmarking exploits:
The impact of the PageRank formula will be the same for social bookmarking usage as they are with forum and blog comments. As you are probably already surmising, the fundamental thing here is the wise usage of links instead of just bombing them. In different terms, quality is the prime concern for search engine optimizers over quantity now.
3. Article submission:
The concept of article submission is a bit more interesting than the previous two things because the impact of the PageRank formula is complex here. However, in terms of article submissions, what everything will boil down to is the fact that you need to start focusing on submitting to high quality and well recognized websites instead of article spamming that is the norm today. For example, instead of submitting a bunch of 100 articles on low profile websites of low repute, you would do well to write 10 extremely high quality articles, deep link to pages within your website fro those articles and then post them on really well known article websites. The idea is to get genuine recognition for your website from genuine users and proper syndication with a reliable website through the right channels.
4. Bulk link exchange gimmicks:
With the induction of the new page rank system, bulk link exchange techniques have become almost useless. The reason for this is simply that bulk link exchanges, more often than not, tend to be random exchanges instead of planned syndication and this is exactly what Google wants to discourage. Therefore, if you wish to draw direct click through traffic towards your website, then you can use bulk link exchange deals, but if you want relevant high PR link building, then you would be better off using more qualitative methods when link building for your website.
It is possible that you are not viewing these changes with a great deal of enthusiasm because they tend to make high PR link building more cumbersome and difficult, especially when compared against the earlier days of search engine optimization and older link building techniques. However, if you look deeper into the impact of these changes, you would realize that they are actually good for your website. The reason for this is simply that these changes are designed to make it easier for the ‘reasonable surfer’ to find links that are relevant to him. Consequently, for the search engine optimizer i.e. you, it would mean more sales conversions to traffic ratio than before. The final goal of any website is to convert visitors into customers and this would be made easy with the new PageRank formula because the likelihood of visitors needing what you offer is increased. Moreover, since every search engine optimizer is in the same boat, this would not give any extra benefit to anyone and the industry is still at par. Hence, the conclusion is simply that you have to focus on qualitative content and genuine syndication instead of creating quantitative back links amongst irrelevant pages. Some ways that you can employ to make this happen can be guest blogs, link baiting, genuinely published press releases, authentic and relevant syndication or tie ups and community creation.
