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Linking, Does Slow And Steady Really Win The Race?

Posted by Paul B | December 20, 2007 .

Getting links to your website is essential if you want to have a good position in the search results, certainly with Google the overall linking picture is the biggest influence on where your pages end up showing, or so they say. The trouble is that over time it has become harder and harder to attract links that Google will value, or so the story goes. With this in mind when it comes to my clients I am very strict on the types of links I build, for some appearance and reputation are perhaps even more important than SERPS positions and with these I am extra careful.

One good example is a company I’ve been working for a year now, because of the sums of money involved (per transaction) it is more important for them be completely above board than to rank number 1 for everything. But why should these 2 things be mutually exclusive? In that year I have build over 400 natural links to their website, all of them on target and related via personal communication with other webmasters. The results although not spectacular are good, from PR1 to PR3 and from no natural search traffic to several thousand visitors. On average they rank about position 20 for each of their main keywords and in the top 10 for all long tail targets. More importantly to the client the traffic converts and all metrics are on a steady upward rise.

I was a bit miffed though this week to receive a link request from a competitor who although only being going several months is already ranking above us. A little bit of checking shows that they’ve done it by gaining tens of thousands of spammy links in a very short amount of time. Thanks Google. As far as I’m concerned their spam site shouldn’t be there but obviously Google doesn’t agree. It seems that all links are good, no matter how bad. I suppose this makes sense, if a link could negatively affect your ranking then what’s to stop people scuppering their competitors efforts by paying for links from a bad neighbourhood? Although Google claim that these links will be of NO benefit I have the feeling that they do provide some tiny tiny amount of benefit in Google’s algorithm. Enough of these and hey ho you’re jumping above legitimate competition. My belief is at some point they will eventually start slipping back down the results, but that is only based on blind faith in Google.

So here’s the question, when it comes to linking does slow and steady legitimate linking really win the day or do you see better results by having huge amounts of non relevant links?

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