It’s not quite true. You
should not think that all you need to do is to get hundreds of links pointing
to your website and you'll gain the number one position on Google. Google
considers many factors when
working out your website's
rankings in search results. If often happens that a page with PR2, for example,
gets a higher position than other pages that PR3 or 4. So, it's not the
PageRank of a site that
Google primarily focuses on
when ranking a site for a set of keywords. Google must be also looking at
something else to rank the sites in search results.
Google is known to look at
these factors when ranking a web page:
number and quality of the links from other
sites;
anchor text of the links;
historical factors;
In the previous chapter we've
already talked about the importance to get as many as possible backlinks from
quality on-focus sites. Let’s stop at the anchor text and historical factors
now. The anchor text is the visual representation of the link. Gone are the
times when it was important to have top keywords related to your site in the
anchor text.
But you can’t use the same
anchor text for all links either. If you build links using the same anchor
text, Google sees those links as spam and will discount them heavily.
After the recent Google Panda
Update it’s important that you diversify your anchor text in a 40%/40%/20%
manner:
40% contain generic anchors
like:
- Click here
- Read more
- Go here
- Find out more here
- Find more info here
- Learn more here
- Visit this link
- Click this link
- Visit this site
- Continue reading
- etc.
40% contain a generic anchor
and your domain, for example:
- Visit yourdomain.com site
- Click yourdomain.com
- Visit my website domain.com
- Read more on my site domain.com
- Find out more at domain.com
- Click on domain.com for a full article
And 20% of your anchors
contain your keywords. That's enough to satisfy Google. Historical factors Google
takes into account are:
When the link is discovered
Whether the link changes with time
How quickly the page gets links from other
sites
Gaining links from other
sites too quickly can result in your page to be de-indexed by Google. You
should make the process of links growth as natural as possible.
