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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 Google 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 Google 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
Google to adjust their algorithms.
Next week we’ll exam ways to get quality one way links
to your site.
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