When I left my day job four
years ago I had four website's, today I have forty
five sites and a while back I noticed that two of
my sites have held their “Top Three” positions
through all of the trends, fads, search engine
updates, even the Florida update did not affect
their top positions. To say the least I was
perplexed, there was nothing really apparent that
made these two sites different in fact I had did a
terrible job of keeping them updated, you know too
busy with the other site's greasing the squeaky
wheels. They were not broken so I did not fix
them.
So anyway I needed to figure out why these
sites had did so well with so little attention.
Now I am thinking if I can just figure out why
then I can do the same to the rest of my sites.
But like I said earlier I did very little to these
sites, they never needed it. It just did not make
sense until after days of hair pulling I decided
to analyze them just like I would do one of my
competitors. First the on page factors had nothing
special just very basic SEO, second I looked at
the list of inbound links nothing really jumped
out at me, so I made a list of my reciprocal
partners from my links page then eliminated those
from the inbound link list, which left about three
dozen links of which six were scraper site's so I
eliminated those so now there are 30 links I did
not know about, at first I thought no big deal
these are just links from site's that wanted a
reciprocal link and I never got back to them, like
I said I had neglected these two sites. Analyzing
the 30 links, six or seven probably were from
reciprocal link request that I had ignored, so I
was left with 23 unexpected links to analyze and
here's what I found
- None of the links were on a links page.
- All of the links were either in an article
or review.
- All of the links had text before and after
the link text.
- Almost all of the links had different text
in the link.
- Most of the pages linking to me only had 5
to 10 outbound links.
- Some of the links were to my home page but
the others were to interior pages.
- Most of the pages linking to me were only
one level deep. (1 click from the home page)
Apparently the handful of “quality
non-reciprocal links” was behind the success of
these two sites, which if you look at it from a
search engine’s point of view it makes perfect
sense because an unbiased, non-reciprocal and
natural occurring link is the only true vote for
the quality of the content on your site. The
search engines and especially are smart
enough to spot reciprocal links and know that a
reciprocal link has nothing to do with the quality
of the content on your site, they know that its
just a trade between two webmasters trying to get
better rankings.
Back when first started counting inbound
links as votes for a site in its algorithms they
did not have to worry about whether the link was
natural, reciprocal or paid because so few people
knew about it, plus unlike today the technology
did not exist back then to easily scan and spot
reciprocal links. But as more people learned about
the power of linking more and more abuse took
place, forcing to adjust their algorithms.
Next week we’ll exam ways to get quality one
way links to your site.
