Link Building - What is a Quality Link?
Link building is almost the synonym of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) ever since the infamous link bombing that leads people who search for “miserable failures” in Google to our president George W. Bush’s resume on official white house website. Of course, Bush’s resume page has nothing to do with the term “miserable failures” which not really many will search for in the search engine. And the Bush’s presidency is up to history to judge.
So every Joe and Mary want quality links to their websites. That’s what Google has been repeatably telling webmaster community too if anyone asks the question why my site didn’t rank well. It’s a consensus that quality links is the decisive factor in search engine positioning. However, the difference in many cases is that different webmasters or link builders may have totally different criteria or opinions what is a quality or good link.
Webmasters new to the SEO playfield believe a link from a page with a high PageRank (PR) is a quality link. A page’s PR is a numeric value visually displayed on Google’s toolbar if you have installed one on your IE browser. Knowledgeable site owners realize that a quality link is a link from a high PR site relevant to your site. Not quiet that simple. There’re quality links that are PR0 (Google updates PR about every quarter). It’s more likely that Google updates only a portion of index database for toolbar in every update. That’s one of reasons many see no change of their homepage PR for a year even though they haven’t stopped link building. On the other hand, we often see PR0 pages rank well for not-very-competitive keywords.
Many high PR and relevant links aren’t really necessary quality links. In the process of helping hundreds of clients promote their websites - SEO service or link building, we have received all types of different link requests. Some want to certain types of links and others don’t want to links built from certain types of techniques. The truth is that it’s really not about the types of links you get. There’s a huge quality difference for the same types of links. It’s not about what techniques you use to build links, and it’s about how you use each technique to acquire links.
There’s a simple way to see whether a link is a true quality link. For a particular search term, if a page is in top 200 or top 1,000 in a particular search engine (Google, Yahoo or MSN), the links from those pages are true quality links for that search engine. Yes, a quality link in Google may not be a quality link for Yahoo and MSN. You won’t find many or any of those pages from high PR directory pages which will charge you $20 to $40 or even more for a listing. The reason is simple. The links to those directory pages aren’t relevant to the content of those pages. Links from those pages are high PR, relevant to your page, but they aren’t true quality links.