Wed Jan 23 21:03:11 PST 2019

211

Link Building
Search engines currently base relevancy primarily on linkage patterns. Who links to
you and how they link to you are what determines where your site will rank for
competitive search queries.
Text in Incoming Links
What Link Text is Good to Use?
If you link to SEOBook.com, a link with the words Search Engine Optimization or
SEO Book are more valuable than a link that says other site. Evaluating the text in
the links, along with who links where, is how the major ways search engines get
feedback from external sources.
Search engines can look for noun-verb patterns in text, but machines can be taught
to crank out text. There is limited cost to content creation, so search engines must
look offsite to understand what a document is about.
Currently link analysis is the most effective way to determine document quality.
How Powerful is Link Anchor Text?
Many bloggers are politically outspoken and view George Bush in a less-than-
favorable light. Hundreds of people have linked to his biography page using the
phrase miserable failure as the link text. Searching on the phrase miserable failure in
Google, at one point in time, ranked the biography page of George W. Bush at the
Whitehouse.gov website as the #1 result in Google. It is a good example of just
how powerful link text can be.
The above mentioned marketing technique is called Googlebombing. In early 2007
Google defused the practice of Googlebombing by deploying algorithms that
check if link anchor text is related to the content of the page, but link anchor text is
still an important aspect of SEO.


Chapter
7