Due to my regular contact with our clients and potential clients there is one subject that is never far from the conversation, link building. With more and more website owners learning the basics of SEO and now understanding concepts such as PageRank and domain authority this gives them a basis to formulate ideas and thoughts on how link building should be achieved. Occasionally though the end result of this is the website owner has skewed and incorrect view on what should be achieved.

Below is a top 5 list of link building myths that I would like to debunk.

1. The higher the PageRank the better the link

I’ve started with this one as it is the one that irks me the most. You may well have a link building company offering you PR3 or 4 links at a low cost but there are a number of things that offers like this fail to address. Most pertinent of which is how relevant is this page to the target site? If the page is irrelevant to your site then despite its supposed authority, the impact a link would have is likely to be minimal for your investment. How many internal and external links are already on the page? A PageRank 4 page with 50+ external links is also going to have negligible benefit and long term is likely to drop in PageRank over time due to their authority being leaked through to so many other domains.

2. Low PR links are less valuable

Link building can be achieved in many different ways but the end goal will remain the same and that is to build the number of back links to your site in a manner that will appear natural to the search engines and hopefully be relevant to users around the internet. The natural element here is the important part but it can be difficult to quantify the term “natural” into a tangible idea or process. Who is to say what is or appears to be “natural”? I personally feel it is much easier to understand what would look unnatural for a linking profile. An organic process of linking would mean that your site would not only be linked high PR pages but instead more often than not will be linked from PR 0 or PR 1 pages as people will never have your perfect SEO strategy in mind when creating the links on their site. So if your link building plan is to only look at higher PR options then you are essentially creating something that is unnatural and could cause alarm to the search engines.

Another factor here comes back to the relevancy of the page linking to you. Gaining a link from a PR 0 page that is 100% related to your site and only has 1 or 2 external links on the page is going to provide more benefit to your site than a PR 4 link from a totally unrelated site with 75 external links already on the page.

3. “No Follow” links add no benefit

So link building improves your site by taking authority from other sites and passing it to yours, but if the link is no-followed then Google will not continue through this link to your site and no authority is passed, right? Well yes according to the concrete information to hand then this process is correct but there are two points I would like to raise. The first comes back to the “natural” linking profile and how this should look for your site. A link profile for any site on the internet that doesn’t include its own fair share of no-follow links would strike me as extremely odd. As previously discussed when people link to sites organically then it is entirely possible that they could no-follow the link to your site. There are many internet forums that use a blanket no-follow on all external links so that if someone points a link to your site during a discussion on a particular subject then you would again be gaining a no-follow link. Likewise all links posted on Twitter are given the no-follow tag and most sites that are worth their salt are likely to have a number of links from these types of sources. With that in mind then why should your link building only include follow links when this is only going to generate something unnatural and therefore have the potential to cause concern.

This brings me nicely on to the second point. Having highlighted all these potential sources of no-follow links such as forums and Twitter it should also be considered that there is a huge source of links out there which supposedly won’t pass any authority but are actually one of the greatest forms of voting for a site. One person recommending to another to look at a site on the subject they are talking about via a forum or Twitter is surely as good a recommendation as any other link out there. Given the fact that I’m probably about half as smart as many of the people working at Google then I am certain that this is something they have considered themselves too.

4. The anchor text for links has to use a specific keyword

This is another point that is often raised that a link has been created but it doesn’t use the exact keyword phrase that should be targeted. This can even go as far as questioning the anchor text for the link using “mens shoes” and not “men’s shoes” because the later has a higher search volume. I’ll give you one clue as to what phrase I am going to use next, it begins with a “n” and ends with an “atural”. Let’s say for example that your site has 1000 backlinks point to it and that you have been working hard on a particular keyword phrase that you would like to rank for. So much so, that of your 1000 links 70% of them actually use the exact anchor text of this keyword phrase. This is sure to show the search engines that you are relevant to that keyword and this should subsequently help move you up in the rankings is it not? Well actually this could have the exact opposite effect of what is desired and this could lead your site to be penalised for what appears to be forced or over optimisation. I have seen this happen first hand and in some cases the penalty can actually cause the rankings of just that keyword to be reduced whilst other keywords still perform perfectly fine. Natural link profiles have a range of anchor text variations even for the same phrase and this is how yours should look too.

5. Links will be permanent and PageRank is guaranteed.

The view of many website owners is that once links have been sourced then that it the end of line as far as link building goes. That link will stay there with the correct anchor text and the PageRank will never drop below its current level.

The sane among us will understand the internet is an ever changing beast and that includes webmasters dropping links from pages, websites going offline and Google’s PageRank toolbar being updated. All of these things and likely another 50 others will affect the link building that you are doing now and have done in the past. For the average site owner there is no magic solution to track this and rectify issues when they arise so realistically I believe that this just has to be accepted as part of the link building process. This backs up the theory that link building is not a one off task that can be shelved when the required result is achieved, instead it is an ever evolving and almost endless process that is as rewarding as the time and effort that is put into it.

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