Selling Websites for a Living

Google used to rely heavily on ‘on page’ factors in deciding where a page should rank in it’s search results. SEO was all about ’stuffing’ the keywords into articles as many times as possible.

By the end, most pages read like they were written by a robot when the truth was they were written FOR a robot, specifically the Google spiders.

Google started looking at other algorithms because too many people new how to ‘cheat’ their system and it was starting to show in their results.

Nowadays Google relies heavily on ‘off page’ factors in deciding whether a page should show in it’s results or not.

The logic is sound enough. Someone writes a blog post and links to an article you wrote or a service you provide. Google sees that as a vote of confidence. The more folk link to a page the more authority it must have.

They measure that authority with their Page Rank system, better known as PR. PR is is a number between 0 and 10 with 0 being the lowest.

PR alone though is no good for SEO because it does not guarantee a search engine placement. Counting how many links a page has pointing at it is not enough for Google to decide where you should appear for a particular search term.

It decides on your placement by counting how many links used the search term as the anchor text for the link. Adobe Acrobat Reader for instance is number 1 for the term ‘click here’ because so many sites have a link pointing at the Acrobat download page using the anchor text ‘click here.’

If you wanted to rank for ‘Manx sausages’ then getting a dozen or so backlinks pointing at your page would probably see you at or very near the top of the search results.

If on the other hand you wanted to rank for ‘offshore banking’ then we would be talking about a link building campaign requiring thousands of backlinks because of the amount of competition in the search results.

To make things more interesting Google tried to counter link manipulation by adding other factors into the equation. For instance, if a link were naturally to appear for a page about Manx sausages you expect it to be from a page about food or the Isle of Man or preferably both.

Google looks for this ‘natural’ link building process and gives more weight to links that are from pages with related topics.

It also gives a lot more weight to a one way link to counter link exchanges.

The other major factor is the PR of the pages linking to you. The more authority they have in your chosen market the less of them you will need to get a high search engine placement.

Again though, Google looks for natural link building. If you were to go and buy 5 PR6 links today and had them all link to you using the same anchor text, alarm bells are going to ring because it just would not happen naturally.

You might get 1 or 2 PR5 links out of every 1000 if the links were natural and genuine and Google knows this.

All link building campaigns should be done slowly, appear to be natural and done with great care.