Getting Backlinks

[Tiffany]

I am finding getting links to my store very time consuming.....often I can spend 3 or 4 hours and sometimes don't even get a response back from other eshops.

Can anyone give me any advice / point me in the right direction - I am loathe to submit to one of these sites which will give many linke exchanges and have been looking for sites which cross over with my own.
Thanks

[crossdaz]

Can anyone give me any advice / point me in the right direction - I am loathe to submit to one of these sites which will give many linke exchanges and have been looking for sites which cross over with my own.


I'll give you an example:

First email I got today was 'Can you add my site to your directory please, its www....
It got deleted.

Another example was someone who emailed out of the blue and said :
'Hi, I notice you have a feature related to my business and thought I'd introduce myself. She included a picture of her work and about 400 words on how she started in the business and so on.

Not only did she get a link, she got a full page feature on another site I run too? It wasn't hard - she virtually wrote it for me?

Hope that gives you some inspiration? :)

[mydogisthebest]

Hi Tiffany, I have had a similar experience in the past, I mean I know there is no such thing as a free ride but if you persist you'll get there in the end, personally I think it is a compliment for someone wanting to exchange links with you, but some are just protecting their hard time and web work - good luck.

[fisicx]

Tiffany, you are focussing on the wrong thing.

Getting a link from another eshop (either free or reciprocal) is a complete waste of time. The search engines weigh each external link and determine if the link is an endorsement or an attempt to boost ranking. The links you are asking for add no value to the visitor and will therefore be ignored by the search engines.

The other thing to think about is your strategy. Why would anyone want to add a link to thier shop that wopuld take the visitor to your shop. It's like Tesco putting up a poster saying shop at Sainsburys.

Google like content. Lots of content. So concentrate on making your site interesting and informative, make every product enticing and attractive and use all you skills to convince your visitors to buy from you rather than you competitors.

Forget all about link building for now.

[Steve2507]

If you are link building via recips, then you really need more than one site so you can do ABC linking.

Contrary to what some believe I believe straight swaps can be beneficial but only very slightly. ABC linking will benefit you more in my experience.

[acee]

In my experience, Google couldn't give two hoots about content.

In a couple of my sites it places low value, low internal backlink, name and address only pages into the main index whilst unique content pages with a high level of internal links are relegated to the supplemental index.

One site is succeeding in my market with pages of no unique content, but a raft of pay per blog backlinks.

[fisicx]

In my experience, Google couldn't give two hoots about content.

In a couple of my sites it places low value, low internal backlink, name and address only pages into the main index whilst unique content pages with a high level of internal links are relegated to the supplemental index.

One site is succeeding in my market with pages of no unique content, but a raft of pay per blog backlinks.

Google says:
Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do. If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site. In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic. Think about the words that users would type to find your pages and include those words on your site.

If your pages are in the supplement index it's because google doesn't think the pages add value to the visitor. What keywords were you using to find the pages?

[acee]

How do you think Google determines how a 'page adds value to a visitor'?

The pages in my site which are most useless attract referals. Pages that I have unique content on are buried.

The main difference I can see is a greater use of common keywords on the useless pages and in anchor text, which may create the illusion of greater relevance, but it is not a measure of how useful it is to the visitor.

None of this is helping Tiffany get backlinks though, which is a very frustrating process. As some of the posters above have suggested, you need an offshore link farm, OH sorry, I mean blog.

General links pages just don't cut it. You have to provide a more resource orientated page that focuses on a narrower interest group to increase relevance. I think that if you can aquire a quite modest number of really good links it will achieve more for your search positions than a large number of throwaway links, but you need something to barter with which is where your blog will come in.

Tiffany - submit to the directory on the end of the Christmas Gift Ideas link in my signature. I'm sure I'll have a category that matches your needs. The page may be supplemental (and hence why you wouldn't have found it in Google before) but it may have some benefit in the future.

[mydogisthebest]

Hi, Yes I agree totally with Acee on this one, just by swapping links alone will not do it, did you know that Googlebot for instance crawls your site and only looks for content, so if you have a gif or jpeg with context within it (like many have) it will simply ignore / overlook it - thus it is not a good idea to have cut and paste on your indexed pages, - content & key words do it, - oh and about 2 years under your sites belt!

[reggiemental]

In my experience, Google couldn't give two hoots about content.

I'd have to disagree with that statement. One of my sites, (not in my sig), is an 'informational' site, although full of quality content, has very few incoming links, and is pretty much PR2 across the whole site. This site is on page 1 for many highly-competitive terms, and earns a very respectable income through Adsense. I even give 'competitors', (basically sites in the same industry I'm writing about), free pages on the site to advertise their services. A 'pro' SEO guy would probably say this is stupid, but it adds lots of valuable content, (which I stipulate must be unique, or the feature gets removed), and in return I ask for a link from the site's home page. I now don't bother with links on any of my sites. Lots of good content, coupled with keyword-rich title tags works very well for me.

[fisicx]

Acee,

You mention referrals and useless pages without discussing the keywords people use to get to those pages. It might just be that google rewgards the outbound links on the 'useless page' to be useful to the visitor and has given you a boost.

I've got loads of pages on page 1 of the SERPs with not one single inbound link. To me this is evidence that google likes lots of relevant content.

As to Tiffany, she doesn't need links in order to rank well - she needs lots of unique content then when the page is ranked and converting well you can work on getting just one or tw oquality links to boost the site up the SERPs.

[acee]

The 'useless' pages contain no outbound links, only internal links to other locations in a similar category or in the same geographic area.

It may be that Google is short of pages to refer searchers to on this topic, but it is certainly nothing to do with content.

I recently got so tired of being unable to attract traffic to my primary keyword pool that I removed a considerable number of pages from a couple of sites. Referals, although still pitiful, increased for the primary keyword pool and one site which had not seen any referals from Google for several months, now gets a steady trickle of referals.

If a website wasn't worthy of traffic, then you remove a large number of pages including the original content, how does it become worthy of traffic?

I'd be very interested if you could shed some light on that!

[fisicx]

The 'useless' pages contain no outbound links, only internal links to other locations in a similar category or in the same geographic area.

Maybe google likes the content on the other pages (which link back to this useless page) and so it gets lots of brownie points.

As to your page removal - if you have the same keywords on lots of pages then google will share the ranking around. If you get rid of these pages google willl give the remaining pages all the pagerank held by the other pages and so it will climb the index.

So what you do is write one page all about the hotels built in the 18th century. Link to the hotel websites, add some images and publish. google will index the page and wait for someone to search for '18th century hotels'.

[sussexrob]

Theres loads of places to get good backlinks

Make a few niche sites with several pages
write content and put on
squidoo
ezinearticles
weebly
hubpages
webjam

do a few on each of those web 2.0 sites and it will help alot. Directory submissions at www.addurl.nu , just do a 100. If you get only a few confirmed over time then thats good.

Dont bother with link requests, as mentioned on other posts, google doesnt seem them as that powerful

One of my sites has just 30 pages, backlinks from those places and gets oveer 300 unique visitors a day and only a year old. Once you write articles to, over time people paste them onto your site and you get a link, its called link baiting and white hat seo.

Rob

[acee]

fisicx - you may have something with the rank sharing, perhaps my problem is that I've shared it around too many pages resulting in each page being too weak to survive!

I find it all very frustrating though. When you can't get pages with unique content into the main index, it removes the incentive to continue to create fresh content. Which kind of brings me back to my original point. Will you get referals simply for having unique content or do you need a reasonable amount of link juice to grease the wheels?

[fisicx]

I'm on page 1 for 'navigation guidelines' without a single inbound link.

What the page has is loads of unique content.

So to answer your question, inbound links will help but it's the content that makes the difference.

[quikshop]

Getting a link from another eshop (either free or reciprocal) is a complete waste of time.

Reciprocal linking with similar themed websites, eShops included is one of the most enduring successful SEO techniques.

Even though Google now actively weed out excessive spam linking with any ol' website that says yes, as long as the websites you link to also link to similar themed websites (this is called your link neighbourhood) it will count as a positive towards your search engine position.

[marsham]

have you thought about text link ads. I haven't done any myself but an SEO guy told me about them.

[fisicx]

Reciprocal linking with similar themed websites, eShops included is one of the most enduring successful SEO techniques

I don't disagree in principle with this statement, but it's becoming less important. Google in particular is much more emphasis on relevance than it is on inbound links. And I'd also argue that quality is far more important than quantity. It may be that out of 100 reciprocal links, 99 have been discounted by google and it's just 1 that provides the link juice.

[acee]

fisicx - that's a good example. You appear to be acting as the authority hub. Particularly interesting since the keywords don't appear in the body of the page.

But the phrase is not competitive. If you were competing against 100,000 other websites targetting those keywords I think that Google would have to use incoming links as the deciding factor.

I must thank you though - you are certainly making me think in a different way about how to move forward with my sites - something I haven't been able to do for some time now.

[fisicx]

But the phrase is not competitive. If you were competing against 100,000 other websites targetting those keywords I think that Google would have to use incoming links as the deciding factor.

How many results do you see? Using google.co.uk I see 46million results, I call that pretty competitive! The actual page itself is vey popular but for all sorts of weird searches. For example:


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There's no way I could ever have predicted those searches which is why I've given up on the whole keyword thing and just write what I want to write.

If you want to rank well for viagra then I agree that you need a lot more than great content to get on page 1. But if you find a niche then it's easy to do well. On your site if you moved away from the mainstream hotel finder concept and introduce (perhaps) listing those hotels that were a little different. Include the quirky and specialist and those with historic backgrounds. Just do something different to all the other hotel websites. Maybe someone will find you, blog about it, add you to stumbleupon even get onto digg. Once you have found your niche then it won't take long for people find you.

[NetConneXions]

Theres only one keyword going on here and thats 'Maybe' :)

[acee]

Admittedly there are a large number of results, but by the middle of page 2 of those results the topics are becoming much more diverse, suggesting that this is not a competitive phrase.

I agree with your comment about the quality of links, and that the majority of links to a site could just be considered noise.

Do you think that the uniqueness of a page's content determines if it is included in the main index or not, and will outbound links to a relevant page assist in moving that page into the main index?

Is there a greater benefit in linking to external websites rather than your own internal pages?

[fisicx]

Admittedly there are a large number of results, but by the middle of page 2 of those results the topics are becoming much more diverse, suggesting that this is not a competitive phrase.

It doesn't matter. People are landing on the site and sticking around, that's what's important. I really don't care how uncompetitive the keywords are, as long as they find me not somebody else. It's possible to make more money from the long tail searches than it is chasing after a competitive keyword. One article I read suggests that up 50% of all searches are long tail - that's a lot of potential customers.

Do you think that the uniqueness of a page's content determines if it is included in the main index or not, and will outbound links to a relevant page assist in moving that page into the main index?

Is there a greater benefit in linking to external websites rather than your own internal pages?

Yes, No, No.

Unique content relevant to the subject will always be given favour, that's exactly what google tells us. Outbound links can give some small benefit if they provide value to the visitor (adds to the usefulenss of the page). Internal linking is very important to the success of a site - google likes to follow links and see where they go.

Use a hirarchal site and logical page structures, write unique, informative and interesting content and add those links necessary for your vistors to navigate easily around the site. That's all you need. People will find you and if the site meets their needs then they will stay and more importantly give your their business.