Advanced Review Search
| Backlink Drip Feeding Explained |
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| Written by Caroline Middlebrook |
| Friday, 12 February 2010 05:07 |
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Backlinks are the primary way of ranking a page in Google and other search engines. The higher number, more targeted and authoritative the backlinks, the better it will rank. However, nothing is quite that simple, and there are many factors that affect the value of any particular backlink. Over time Google has highly refined its ranking algorithm and these days it is no longer a case of simply throwing as many backlinks as possible to the target page. In other articles I will discuss many of the factors that affect the quality of the link itself, but in this article I want to focus on the frequency and pattern in which backlinks come into your site and introduce a technique known as link-spreading, or drip-feeding. The Google spider runs constantly and it is always crawling websites looking for links. As well as examining the link itself, Google is also looking at the overall pattern in which the links come in. Google prefers 'natural' links. What does that mean? Let's say you have a website about Persian cats and you write a great article about a new technique for grooming your Persian cat in the winter time. This article is read and you start to find that other website owners such as bloggers write about your article and link to it. Some readers might bookmark at their favourite social bookmarking site. Others may tweet about it, Stumble it and so it goes on. These are what are called 'natural' links. These kinds of links look natural to Google because they are generated over a period of time in a fairly random pattern and they are located in different places. Google does not give as much credit to backlinks that look unnatural. For example, social bookmarking is one of the tools in the IMAutomator suite. An individual may have just one favourite bookmarking site but of course there are a great many and IMAutomator allows you to submit your bookmark to all of them. 50 backlinks is better than 1! However, we don't want those 50 links to be created all at once because Google sees this and deems it to be an unnatural linking pattern and thus doesn't give those links as much credit as usual. The solution then, is to spread those backlinks out over time and this is what we call backlink spreading or backlink drip feeding and this is the technique that IMAutomator uses. Are there any downsides to this strategy? There are always at least two sides to any story! Another benefit of posting backlinks to sites such as social bookmarking sites is that it is a great way to help your article get indexed in the search engines and this is particularly useful if you're posting links to a brand new site. If you spread the links out over a long time, it may take a while for the page / site to get indexed. Another possible downside is that you could potentially lose out on the benefit of a hot new trend. This depends very much on the subject of your article. The cat example I used earlier is something that is timeless - there will always be Persian cats that need grooming so this is an article that can sustain the test of time. However if you are writing about something new, such as an event that has just occurred in the news, then you might want more immediate attention. If there is a flurry of links coming into sites on a specific new topic, Google can see this as a hot trend and push the relevant article further up in the rankings for a while. So is there a formula to determine how many links should be created in any given period? In a word, no - it's just not set in stone. The approach IMAutomator takes is to give you the flexibility to choose your linking frequency. If you want a quick submission, you can set it to complete in one day or you can choose to spread it out over a number of days. You are in control. For the bookmarking tool (and future tools will work in a similar way), when you submit the details of your bookmark to IMAutomator, you can pick a number of days for those links to be spread out over. Your bookmarks are submitted to a number of bookmarking sites and these will always change around a bit. Some sites come and go and we're always updating our database to try and find new sites to submit to. About the Author: IMAutomator is a free tool that automates the process of link building to your website. It contains a social bookmarking tool which submits your bookmarks to many sites in a completely automated way. Create your free IMAutomator account now! Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites                             |