Backlinks – The Never Ending Quest For Backlinks
Backlinks – The Never Ending Quest For Backlinks ! can seem like an endless slog with very little benefit to show for your efforts. So is all this effort really necessary, should we devote so much time to acquiring backlinks or has the time come to realise that backlinks are not something we should focus on at all!
An extreme statement you may think, especially as we are told that one of the most important factors in getting a site to rank well is to have numerous quality backlinks.
But just pause for a moment and ask yourselves what it takes to get a new website any sort of reasonable listing in the search engine results pages (SERPs) ?
That statement is easier said than done as I am sure many of you have now discovered! Add to this the constant dilema over the do-follow - no-follow links issue and we find ourselves going around & around in circles & making very little progress at all.
Bad Practices
Yes there are a couple of things we should avoid at all costs, in our pursuit of backlinks, if indeed we should pursue them at all;
1. Do not engage in link exchange with sites that are known as link farms. Any link exchange system is frowned upon by Google. Even a link directory on your own site can be a dangerous practice.
2. Do not engage in the practice of buying backlinks. This is a major offence as far as Google & many of the other major search engines are concerned!
Ok so we do not buy back links & we avoid the link farms like the plague, so what is left…?
What is left my friends is the dubious practice of sending out hundreds of grovelling butt kissing emails to as many competitor sites as possible, begging them to link back to our new site & share what little page rank they may have! Now lets just think about this for a moment, what exactly is it we are begging for..? 
Compare To The High Street
Well lets apply this scenario to the local high street for a moment, Mr Robinson owns a very lucrative butchers shop at one end of the high street, YOU decide to open a butchers shop at the other end of the high street maybe just 300 mtrs from Mr Robinsons shop. Now after a couple of weeks of initial curiosity from passers bye, your trade such as it was, starts to tail off somewhat! Having racked your brain to come up with a workable solution, you decide to give Mr Google (the local business advisor) a call & ask for assistance.
Advice From The Search Engines
Mr Google is very obliging & calls in to see you the very next morning & for a little morale support he brings along his two closest advisors, Mr Yahoo & Mr Bing. Now Mr. Googles advice is quite simple, if you need more customers then you need to show us as many references as you can possibly get, stating what a great butchers shop you have! Oh that’s no problem you reply, I’ll just pop next door to my neighbours and ask them, they are friends of mine & I’m sure they will be happy to oblige. No replies Mr. Google, that will not do at all, you see on one side of you is a shoe shop & the other side is a florist, what do these people know of what constitutes a great butchers shop..? No I’m afraid if you want any sort of recognition, then you are going to have to get some authorative references from someone who knows what it takes to be a good butchers shop.
“Yes you now see where this is going don’t you..?”
Mr. Robinson has had a very lucrative business on the high street for quite a few years, YOU have now set up shop in direct competition to Mr. Robinson & now you have to go to him cap in hand, kiss his butt & beg for a reference hahaha . I’m sure that even the slowest dim witt of the class would see this is a total non starter & a futile excercise. The vast majority of the emails you send out will get dumped straight in the bin, so ask yourselves how many articles could you have written in the time it took to track down all those email addresses, compose your emails & send them out..??
You may see this as an over simplified version of what actually takes place on the Internet, but I assure you there is very little difference. I have received numerous requests myself for back links to various websites & ok call me Mr. Selfish if you must, but when I have struggled damned hard to acquire what little page rank my sites may have, there is no way on earth I intend linking back to some obscure site that has nothing what so ever to do with my own sites. Believe it or not I have yet to receive what I would class as a genuine request to backlink, most of what is received is either promoting male genital enhancement, dubious drug acquisition & usage or even one I recall was all about surrogate pregnancy, what the hell these have to do with Diy Computer Repairs, is totally beyond my comprehension!
The Social Media Stance On Backlinks
Some very big Social Media heavyweights have changed their policy on backlinks, such heavyweights as Twitter, Stumbleupon, Digg, Technocrati & many other social sites. Many of these social networks have recently decided to use the rel=nofollow meta tag, which basically means that whilst you may still continue to add your pages & posts to bookmark lists on these sites, the search engines are now instructed to ignore these links by use of the rel=nofollow tag. The people running these big sites seem to forget who it was that put them there in the first place, because without our support they would cease to exist !
The Big Boys Unfair Advantage
So now we have a situation where you as a small web entrepreneur are now adding the links of the big boys to your sites & if you do not use the rel=nofollow meta tag, then you will also be helping to promote these big sites, whilst they now refuse to help promote your site! Now perhaps you can see the major flaw in the current situation. So what is the answer..? Well from my own personal experience, we should all be more selective in who we allow backlinks to, by using the dofollow & nofollow meta tags. Yes by all means follow your fellow bloggers! But I am very reluctant to follow these big social media sites when they refuse to return the favour.
I do not buy backlinks & do not send out hundreds of grovelling butt kissing emails (that just isn’t me I’m sorry to say), so why then do I currently have around 1,000 backlinks on a site that was 3 months old on 3rdDecember..? Well I strongly believe in the idea that if you provide decent content, and the site in question is easy to navigate & pleasing on the eyes, then backlinks will come naturally given time!
I personally think that backlinks should be taken out of the site ranking algorithms, for the reasons mentioned above. Backlinks should be used more as a confirmation of high ranking & not as a reason to award high ranking. Just think of the favorites button on your browser do you add crap sites to it..? No of course you don’t & it is exactly the same obtaining backlinks, provide quality informative articles & people will naturally link to you, because they are interested in what you have to say & for the information that you provide.
Yes numerous high quality back links can serve to emphasize the importance & quality of a website, but to place backlinks as the major deciding factor in whether or not a new website ranks well in SERPs, seems to me to be like putting the egg before the chicken! Or maybe it is just a ploy geared more towards keeping the top spots for the big boys, than allowing fair trade & competition on the world wide web.
What are your thoughts & experiences on backlinks…? Please feel free to add your comments below.
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Posted by Steve Nickson
on Mar 15 2012. Filed under SEO Optimization.
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