There was this interesting post in YouMoz yesterday entitled “LinkBuilding:Mislead to Believe” where the author Tripti debunked 6 linkbuilding myths that has been an area for debate in the SEO world for the last few years.
Myth #1: Outbound Links can kill your rankings
There is this belief that outbound links can diminish your PR or rankings but this is not true according to Tripti. Linking to other websites will not kill your rankings if you do it to provide value to your readers. Just imagine if you become a good resource and link people to the places they like to go in the internet. Wouldn’t your website have more value? Even if some people think that the search engine algorithms is robotic, it is not. It still looks for quality websites who care for their visitors.
Myth #2: Reciprocal links won’t work
The issue here is not the act of reciprocal linking but how the reciprocal linking is done. When some people hear about reciprocal linking, they immediately assume that they should search for people with link pages. This is wrong. Search engines do penalized people who are engaging in this link focused activity. However, if one person saw his link on your website and decided to link back then there’s nothing wrong with that. Yes it is a reciprocal link but it is done all because the sites are related and they compliment each other. As you can see, search engines do not like it when you try to game their system. So it is best to do linking in the most natural way.
Myth #3: Link with a Higher Page Rank
People have always fussed about pagerank when in reality, they should be looking on the combination of page rank and outbound links. Tripti showed this in his example:
Who says backlinks from PR 5 is better than PR 1? Look at this PR calculation formula:
PR (A) = 1 – d + d ( PR(B) / L(B) + PR(C) / L(C) + PR(D) / L(D) + ….. )
d = 0.85 (damping factor derived statistically)
The final Page Rank of your web page equals to 1-0.85 + 0.85 x (PR/ number of outbound link).
Now, for instance, you have web page A. You are getting links from two pages: one is B and other is C.
Page B (page rank- 5, number of outbound links – 100)
Page C (page rank- 1, number of outbound links – 10)
According to the formula above, if web page A gets link from page B, the final PR will be 0.15 + 0.85 x 5/100= 0.193.
And if A gets a link from C, the final PR will be approximately 0.24.
So you see, the final PR value of Page A will be better if linking with C has PR 1 than linking with a page B that has PageRank 5.
Myth #4: Link with a high PR website
Linking with a high PR website is worthless if your link is not located on a high PR page. You must learn to search high PR pages. This goes for the traditional linking methods of commenting and link building as well.
Myth #5: Permanent Link Building
Links are never permanent. You have to build it on a continuous basis and some webmasters tend to remove some links as time passes. It is therefore important to make your link building process continuous.
Myth #6: Paid Links are Unethical
In reality, there is really no difference between free and paid links except that the paid links are put in particular pages they like and it is paid. There is nothing unethical about it for they are not stepping over those who are securing free links.
It is a rather interesting read. For the whole article, visit YouMoz.
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