What is a Link Profile?

A sites link profile simply put is the overall summation of links that points to a given site. If you break it up into 4 parts it will start to make sense. Relevant Links, Authoritative Links, Link Volume, and the Timing / Age of the links.

Relevant Links
These come from sites that are similar in topic to yours. The weight of the link doesn’t matter as much, why, because its an on theme link. These are important because they help convey to the search engines what the overall theme of the site is, IE. What keywords should they rank for.

Authoritative Links
Authoritative backlinks are ones that come from old, trusted sites, that have large amounts of links.  A link from these sites pass lots of juice, and show the search engines that the site being linked to is one of quality.

Link Volume
The sheer amount of links pointing to a site is known as the volume of links to a site. This is a highly debated subject in the SEO world. Many beginners get caught up in this facet too much, thinking, many links is > a few links. When the fact of the matter is some sites with a few on topic, relevant, authoritative links can rank higher then a site with thousands of backlinks from unrelated sites. Although this is the case, having lots of links certainly wont hurt your site (in most cases, as long as the links are on topic).

Link Age/ Timing
The older the backlink, the better. Obtaining links for short periods of time in my opinion are a waste. A true, natural link will persevere, and generally stays on a site for a long time. The longer it stays, the more juice it will pass. This is built into the algorithms.  Along with the age of a backlink, timing is also involved. Some topics become stale, with no new links for extended amounts of time. If a site begins to obtain lots of related, on theme backlinks, then that can be a sign to the search engines to rank that site higher.

Overall Link Profile
As you can see the overall link profile of a site can say a lot of different things. It is important to have a diversified link pattern. Sites that choose to take part in 1 of the 4 things are more likely to plummet when certain algorithmic updates occur.  Keep your site safe by simply diversifying.

In an attempt to stop sites from further increasing page rank via Wikipedia’s easily accessible means of posting links, Wikipedia announced it will now use NoFollow tags around all external links. In my opinion this will deter SEO’s from taking advantage of Wikipedia.

I have seen many examples of “resource” sites utilizing Wikipedia for increased search engine exposure to only later, turn the resource site into an Ecommerce site.

In the past Wiki pages have ranked extremely well for many competitive terms. It will be very interesting to watch the SERPS too see how Google reacts to the NoFollow tag placement around all external links. It will also be interesting to watch the sites that ranked well via the large amount of Wikipedia links they had.

Keep those link sellers honest with automatic NoFollow checking! 

Sub Domains. There is lots of theory out there as to how to use them, and to be honest, most of them have validity. However a few things can be said about how Google looks at them. It should be known that weight / link popularity are not inherited from the parent domain. Sub domains are essentially looked upon as a different site.

A good rule of thumb for sub domains is to use them when you need to separate content, because it might not be relevant with the rest of the site. In my opinion this helps Google understand the true content of your site and will not lead to the dilution of its overall theme.
Another way to use them is promotional marketing purposes, in an attempt to ingrain a message into the user. Perhaps its needed to help the user remember the site, for example a television ad for the new Video by AOL - video.aol.com

.Edu and .Gov domains are supposedly worth a lot of weight in Google and other search engines. Many people go out of their way to build links on educational and government websites. The first thing to do when building these sorts of links is to find the most relevant locations. For each of your keywords that you are targetting go to google and type the following:

“Target Keyword” site:.edu
“Target Keyword” site:.gov

Doing this will show you the most relevant pages to start looking for links from.

#1 Title Tag
#2 Anchor Text of Links
#3 Keyword Use in Document Text
#4 Accessibility of Document
#5 External Links to Linking Pages
#6 Primary Subject Matter of Site
#7 Internal Site Links
#8 Link Popularity of Site
#9 Uniqueness of Text
#10 Age Factor

Title Tag:

Denoted by the < title > tags in HTML, this tag always shows at the top of a browser window and often appears in the results as the title of the web page. You should use unique Title tags on every page of your site. Keep the title tags short and concise and focus on no more then three key phrases.

Anchor Text of Links:

Several factors involved with this including the phrasing, words used, and order and length of a link’s anchor text. Specific anchor text links help a site to rank better for that particular term/phrase in the search engines. IE.< ahref = " http://www.example.com " > this is the anchor text < /a >

Keyword Use in Document Text:

Basically this is your content on your pages. You don’t want to overuse your target keywords nor do you want to under use them. Good practices is to have ~500 words on the page with about 1-2% keyword density.

Accessibility of Document:

This isn’t necessarily a ranking issue but is extremely important to rank in the first place. Accessibility can be compromised by using URL re-directs that search engine spiders cannot follow, hiding content behind select forms, javascript, or pages using long dynamic strings IE. eaxmple.com/test.aspx?testID=75858&TabID=654956&UrlID=234. Frankly put if a search engine cannot find your content then you cannot rank for it.

External Links to Linking Pages:

Quality > Quantity. At first glance one might think the more links pointing to a page on your site the better the chance is has to rank for that term. This isn’t true in some cases. When developing “backlinks” you should try and obtain links on other relevant sites. Gaining thousands of links from random, obscure sites can actually hurt your rankings if you’re not careful.

Primary Subject Matter of Site:

This one is pretty much common sense but important none the less. A site that specializes in just basketball for example, is more likely to rank for the term “Basketball” then a site that specializes in Football.

Internal Site Links:

This for example is your site navigation as well as any link on your site that points to another page of your site. It is important to use keywords throughout your site that link to other relevant pages. Beware however, if your not careful you can hurt your rankings if you abuse this. The longer an internal link is there, the greater weight it carries as well.

Link Popularity of Site:

This is what makes an “authority site”. Link popularity simply measures the importance of all the links to a unique domain, the more links from related, on topic sites the better. This factor really helps you rank for terms that you might not necessarily optimize for. IE. Terms you don’t purchase links for, terms you might not have in your title tag, terms that are less competitive etc. etc.

Uniqueness of Text:

The sites overall uniqueness of text is a key determinant of its ranking. Sites with template style text, where every word is the same on each page except only a handle full of terms just doesn’t look as “authoritative” as sites which have unique content on each page of the site.

Age Factor:

The age factor applies to basically everything. Age of domain, age of back link, age of internal link, how often text is changed, how often back links are acquired. In most cases the older it is the better. This aspect helps show authority to the search engine.

Summary:

Optimizing your site for the search engines can be a daunting task. The following list is a good general breakdown of what to look for when tackling this challenge. Keep in mind search engines don’t like you “gaming” them. All the factors stated above should be done to a degree, carefully optimizing and drawing the line of “over optimization” is critical. Steadily build unique content. Strike link deals with relevant sites that are not spammy in nature. The best piece of advice to follow in my opinion is to optimize for the end user.

Google has blogged, spoken verbally at public conferences, and have made it public that they do not condone people buying links with the intention of manipulating their rankings. This has not always been Google’s stance on the situation. To be honest this situation didn’t exists some time ago. Its just recently with the outbreak of “buying links for TBPR” that Google’s engineers have made it evident that they are aware of the situation at hand and are taking countermeasures. Some of these include situations where they will block a sites ability to pass PR, link popularity etc if they are supposedly selling links.

Could this all be a ploy by Google to protect their bottom line (ie. Adwords)? Perhaps they just say their doing this to strike fear in Webmasters. Webmasters who par take in advertising with contextual links on others sites to help drive traffic and awareness of their site.

Google has stated if you wish to buy text links then to place a Nofollow tag around them, blocking their “vote” essentially. However, if links were around before Google was established, who’s to say that you have to place Nofollow just because they want you to? The foundation of Googles algorithms were even based and still are based on the underling link structure holding it together.

Until Google changes their algorithms’ link based ranking system, in my opinion there will always be that fine line of contextual link advertisements. Whether you decide to exercise Nofollow tags on your links is up to you however.

Just remember that advertising is advertising. Google is not going to abandon there search engine architecture and completely devalue links, doing so would ruin there SERPS and would essentially create a completely new collection of search results, across the board.

If your adverts bring in quality traffic, then utilize the system for what its worth. Why shoot yourself in the foot by integrating Nofollow tags around your advertisements.

Link bait is the catch phrase of the year. If you’re not onto what link bait is then you probably aren’t too much into internet marketing. Every other blog post or search engine marketing forum post this year has had it mentioned in it.

So what is it?
Link baiting is the sole principle of making an article, image, idea, tool, etc. that is so irresistible, so remarkable, that the world feels the need to share it with others. This is why search marketers relish in it. Imagine something that can create free backlinks, free traffic, free promotion why you sleep. Proper link baiting can be an unstoppable force.

Most of the time, “link bait” is something controversial. If you notice something in your industry that is ridiculous, talk about it, blog it, then go post it in forums, get it out there so the public can relish in the “ridiculousness” of it. Then just sit back and watch as other’s do the work for you.

Google even mentioned it lately as a preferred technique for building links. Bottom line is if your not link baiting yet, you should be, so get out there and do it!

Quick tip of the week: Compare your organic ranking in google, to your “allinanchor: example term” rank. If the allinanchor rank is higher then you might need more on page optimization, if it’s lower then look at the amount of links that page has, it could need more.

Offering a free tool to the public related to your site can be a great way to generate back links. The idea is to set up a domain (separate from your current site) and offer a free tool that would be of use to the public. The users will then have access to the free tool once the back link snippet is placed and confirmed on the users website that they manage. This obviously wouldn’t work for all sites, b/c some are not tech savvy and the chances of them managing a web site are smaller. None the less a good idea for niche markets that are tech savvy.

Many webmasters now a days have networks of sites. Google has expressed that using them to artificially increase rankings can be hazardous. They have methods of identifying “networked” sites. There are several ways they go about this to take note on:

Site hosted on the same web servers
Sites with similar IP addresses even if they are 22.231.113.64,  22.231.113.65
Similar site structure
Similar editors
Sites with the same CMS
Sites who use the same affiliate ID’s
Similar Adsense publisher code

Granted, Matt Cutts, Google spokesperson has stated that simply owning all the sites doesn’t automatically hurt you in the SERPS it’s just when you start to inter link them to build up artificial rankings in the search engines that you might start running into problems.