DISQUS

Dave Robinson · 1 year ago

Nice post, thanks. It's obvious if you frequent business forums with SEO sections that website owners are getting horribly bewitched bothered bewildered by the subject of link building.

It's also obvious, to me anyway, that Google is going to have to work very very hard on their algo if it's going to remain useful. Link spamming is reaching epidemic proportions with thousands of companies offering rubbish links that seem to impact the SERPs. We live in interesting times.

d

Barry Welford · 1 year ago

I think you're right, Dave. That's particularly why I added in Commandments #8 and #9, which are not part of the Google Quality Guidelines. I'm absolutely sure, as are many others, that in addition to the poor PageRank for such links, the Google algorithms will apply a very low weighting to such links. It's a double whammy on them. I only wish some of the Link gurus would point this out more forcefully.

If you have automated systems that produce tens of thousands of such links, then perhaps you can win. Anything that involves human effort to get mere hundreds is a complete waste of resources.

Reynder Bruyns · 1 year ago

Good solid post!! Almost everybody is focussing on 'how to'. This results in really idiotic linkbaiting articles from al sorts of seo 'experts' and no focus on content and best practice.

Malte Landwehr · 1 year ago

I think most of Verma commandments go hand in hand.
Create Content (10) + Social Media (2) + Press Releases (6) = Link Baiting (3)
And this chain of action is probably the most successful. Even if it does not bring you the rankings you want, it lays a foundation of trust and natural backlinks upon which one can put a bunch of high PR links (via trading or buying).

Barry Welford · 1 year ago

You're probably right, Malte. However the original Commandments were 'Thou Shalt Not's. Verma was listing suggestions rather than prohibitions.

Brent · 1 year ago

Linking strategy and SEO go hand in hand. It seems to me that one of the more important (but completely unfair) rating methods is based on the age of the web site. Unfair because it would indicate that new sites have little chance of good ratings.

The other issue is that you get rated on the quality of links to your site but surely this is susceptible to a newer, more refined version of 'Google Bombing' where you trash a serious competitiors site by creating one of those hated 10,000 page junk sites linking back to them.

Can you improve your rankings by getting a competitor delisted? I believe so. Would it be worth it? I really can't answer that, I suspect not. Regards.

Anthony Buchalka · 1 year ago

Some great information thank you. I still find it surprising that so many sites still use poorly poorly written html and many sites don't seem to understand the significance of using keywords in link anchor text.

regards,

Anthony

Justin Briggs · 1 year ago

Solid list of commandments. I really thing it varies on the goal of the site. Many MMO types are looking for a quick buck and could care less about the long term. But any site that wants to out perform all the various slaps Google performs to various linking building methods, should follow these. At the end of the day, only quality contextual related links can go the distance without concern for getting slapped by Google.