The Good The Bad and the Ugly Backlinks

The good the bad and the ugly of backlinks will make or break SEO Companies from now on. Up until now backlinks were the prime tool of SEO Companies. SEO Companies hired non–technical staff to place links on the internet pointing to their client’s site to give them better ranking in search engines, but now this has all changed. Enter Bing the Microsoft search engine; Bing has made a big impact on SEO and its competitor Google. Although Bing only has a small percentage of users it has Google jumping through hoops trying to counter its advantages and features. Google has changed its search page to be more like Bing and even went as far as to have the wallpaper pictures like Bing temporarily. But the biggest change was to its indexing system, a change called Google Caffeine that copies a lot of Bing logic. Both Bing and now Google with Google Caffeine has placed less prominence on backlinks quantity and more on quality.

The Good

Quality Links is what counts now, a quality link comes from a relevant site though relevant link text to a relevant page on your site. The less links on the linking page the better. The popularity of the linking page is also important.

The Bad

Bad links are from non relevant pages, with non relevant link text. Let’s say with have a client that sells Steel Sheds and the company is called Acme Fabrications. We have a Plant Nursery that buys sheds from Acme Fabrications and has a supplier’s page that links along with all its other suppliers to Acme Fabrications web site. The link text will more than likely be "Acme Fabrications". This is a bad link, the relevance of a Plant Nursery to Steel Sheds is slim and since it’s on the suppliers page its even less relevant. And since it has the Link Text "Acme Fabrications" It’s not going to be relevant to someone looking for a Garden Shed. Most links to business sites have the company name as the link text, but what it should have is the keyword that will bring in people wanting to buy a shed.

Now let’s change things around, let’s put the link on a content page, not the suppliers page along with all the other non-relevant links. Let’s use the link text "Garden Shed" pointing to your site with the text garden shed and maybe other Plant nursery terms also relevant to Garden Sheds. We now have a good link, the linking pages is relevant to the link text as well as the linked page. It’s not rocket science but it’s a lot harder to find such links.

The Ugly

The Ugly links are the most numerous of all links pointing to business sites. They are the easiest to get and up until now they did the job. They are from paid link sites or free link directories with little or no relevance with huge numbers of links on the pages. Often they don’t have link text at all; they just have the URL as the link text. These are Ugly links of no value or even negative value if your ration of good to ugly links is bad. Both Bing and Google give these sites little page authority and what authority they have is dividing up by the number of links on the page.

Conclusion

Good Links are invaluable and worth taking time and to get. Bad links are of little benefit and not worth your time pursuing. Ugly links are to be avoided like ugly girls.