Link Building

The majority of your backlinks you acquire should:


Have a varied anchor text

Target your keywords but make very sure to vary the anchor a lot. Even a few “click here” is good to get.

Come from related pages
This is probably the most important, especially for english web sites. It is commonly believed that links from related pages carries more “weight” (not PR).


Come from different locations on the linking pages.
Don’t have all the backlinks from footers or any other specific place. Have them on the top of the page, inside the body text, navigation, footer etc.

Placed with a gradual natural increase
Don’t place hundreds or thousands of links to a new site the first days … I have tested that and gotten the site banned in Google. You need to gradually place the links and the quantity all relates to how much links the site is usually getting. So if a site usually gets 10 new links per week then don’t place 100 suddenly one day.

Placed from pages with a varied PR value
In my opinion not more than 15-20% of your backlinks to a site should be from PR 5+ pages.

Come from good neighbourhood
Don’t have a majority of your backlinks from adult, pharmacy, and poker/casino sites. Such sites are known to spam and I am pretty sure Google frowns upon them.

Come from different C-class IPs
Google sees this. Have your links coming from total different sites.

Come from both old trusted as well as new sites
It is also good to mix this up.

Come from reciprocal linking
Reciprocal links are still good but don’t have them as a majority of your backlinks. 3-way-linking is a good alternative but don’t use any patter.

Point to internal pages as well as your home page
Never underestimate backlinks pointing to your internal pages. As you have your internal pages SEO’d as well, get backlinks to these as well with varied anchor. It is been speculating that the value of these has increased during the BigDaddy update.

Come from non-directories
A selected few directories such as ODP and Yahoo carries trust in Google from the editorial vote. However, many directories does not give that and I even suspect that having a majority of your backlinks from 200 free general directories even can do harm to your link profile. They can still be good but should just be something extra to the links you already have.

Not be temporary
The age of your backlinks is important. It has even been speculated that this is a factor of the Google Sandbox filter. Strive to get permanent links. When renting links, rent for as long as possible.

Not have paid linking footprints around them
Words such as sponsors, advertisement and the like are spotted by Google and are devalued. If the majority of your backlinks come from such links it could maybe even do you harm.

Not come from pages that links to bad neighbourhood
You should not place your links on pages that are in bad neighbourhood, but you should also not place them on sites that themself link to these kind of sites. Google uses advanced relation and co-citation systems in their algo.

Come from pages with the same language
Seem to be obvious but is very important to show up properly in the Google country specific searches. It seems to be from my recent observations that this is the most important factor in determining the language of the site for Google (other factors is IP, Domain name TLD and actual written language of the site).