Backlink Blues (sung to the tune of Down Home Blues)
Well I built a cool website
And it ranked for long tails
But them big money keywords
Was just a big FAIL.
Great content ain’t nothin’
‘Cause it left me with the backlink blues.
Backlink blues . . .backlink blues . . .
I built it but they didn’t come
And now I got the backlink blues.
If you’re just starting out in the make money online game, you might not know what a backlink is. A backlink is a link on another site that points to the site you’re trying to rank in the search engines for.
Beginners often put all of their energy into building a great site with quality content and forget that getting backlinks to that site is the other half of the equation for online success—the most important half. Of course, Google says otherwise. Google says that if you build great content, visitors will somehow find your site, read it, and backlink to it without being asked, because they love it so much.
Google has to say this, because they don’t like site owners getting backlinks by artificial means. They want their search results to be a meritocracy. This would work if there were no money to be made online and the ‘net was a pure marketplace of ideas. But the reality is, there is a bundle of money to be made online, and Google is making more of it than anyone. In fact, their AdSense program made $1.8 billion gross sales in 2008. In such a competitive environment, business owners use Search Engine Optimization seo(SEO) techniques to try to get more traffic than other sites in the same niche, or subject area.
On-page SEO consists of writing your site’s pages so the search engines (mainly Google) can tell what those pages are about and classify them into search results. Search engines get their results by using a programming formula (called an algorithm, or ‘bot/robot) to scan (crawl) the pages for keywords and their surrounding context. Google likes on-page SEO because it makes Google’s job of returning quality search results easier.
Off-page SEO consists of getting backlinks by various proactive means. Google doesn’t really like you being proactive with backlinks, but it tolerates some off-page SEO techniques more than others.
For instance, you’ll never have a Google problem if you e-mail a site owner in your niche and say, “Would you mind checking out my site, and if you like it, would you place a backlink to it on your site? This fits in with Google’s view of the web as a meritocracy, but remember that the web is also a competitive environment, and backlinks are so valuable that they’re a form of currency. That site owner will probably think, “What’s in it for me?” So if you’re lucky and he doesn’t just trash your e-mail, he’ll write you back and say, “I’ll link to you if you link to me.” Google sees even this type of harmless link trading as beyond the scope of its meritocracy, so it assigns less value to reciprocal links that point to each other. How much less? Nobody really knows; we just know that two-way links are less valuable than links that only point one way.
If you’re doing off-page SEO, it’s important to distinguish between backlinks that Google merely devalues and backlinks that Google actually punishes you for. Think of it as the difference between a civil infraction like a parking ticket, and a felony crime. Two-way links are a civil infraction. There are some Google misdemeanors in between, too. Google owns about 72 percent of the search engine results online, so it functions as judge, jury, and executioner.
In that “gray hat” area between the purely “white hat” one-way link, and the felony level, there are a lot of things you can do to get backlinks to your site. Most of them involve some degree of automation through SEO software, and that’s why they’re “gray.” Google hates automation, because when taken to the limit it allows one human being to bombard the internet with literally hundreds of thousands of sites and backlinks to sites. If you’ve ever run across a really crappy looking site with nothing but links and text that looks like some twisted form of Russian, you’re looking at an example of what in Google’s view is an internet felony. If you’re bothering to read this post, then trust me, you don’t want anything to do with this stuff. Not only are those folks utterly ruthless, but it’s way too much work: slap up 1,000 sites in a day, get 100,000 backlinks, make money for a week, Google nukes everything, rinse and repeat. Stick to white and gray techniques and you’ll avoid the Backlink Blues.
In my next post, I’ll talk about some software tools for getting backlinks.
