Official search engine statement: link building do's and dont's

Bing recently published a document about link building. Although it focuses on how Bing deals with inbound links, it can also help you to get better links for Google, Yahoo and other search engines. The most important points of Bing's document can be found in this article.

The importance of link building

The Bing engineers know that link building is important and they describe link building as follows:

"Link building is a very important form of self-promotion on the Web. You contact webmasters of other, related websites and let them know your site exists. If the value that you have worked so hard to instill in your site is evident to them, they will assist their own customers by linking back to your site. That, my friend, is the essence of link building."

In other words, reciprocal linking is fine. They also remind webmasters that link building is an ongoing process:

"Think of link building as your chance to build your reputation on the Web. As your website is likely one of your business' most valuable assets, consider link building to be a primary business-building exercise. Just don't make the mistake of believing it will result in instant gratification. Successful link building efforts require a long-term commitment, not an overnight or turnkey solution. You need to continually invest in link building efforts with creativity and time. Good things come to those who wait (and work smartly!)."

Things that you can do to get good links to your website

Here are the things that Bing recommends:

• You should develop your website as a brand and brand it consistently. People like to link to high quality websites.
• You should find relevant bloggers, industry websites and product reviewers and make them aware of your website.
• You can publish concise and informative press releases online.
• You can publish expert articles in article directories.
• You can participate in relevant conversations on blogs and forums and add a link to your website when applicable.
• You can use social networks to connect to industry influencers. Your profiles should contain links to your website.
• You can use email newsletters to notify people about new content on your website.
• You can launch a blog or a forum on your website.
• You can participate in relevant industry associations and their online forums.
• You should strive to become a trusted expert voice for your industry while promoting your website.

Warning: the following things will get your website in trouble

Just like Google and other major search engines, Bing doesn't like to be cheated. If they detect unnatural linking patterns, your website might be penalized. The following things can trigger search engine filters:

• Your website get a lot of additional inbound links a very short time.
• Many links that point to your website are from unrelated websites or blog comments.
• Your web pages contain hidden links.
• You get links from links farms or automated link exchange systems.
• Paid links point to your website.
• Known spammers link to your website.
• Your website links to known spammers.

Here's what Bing does when they find suspicious data that is related to your website:

"When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction. If the spam rating is high, a site can be penalized with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index."

Getting inbound links requires some work. The Bing engineers are very clear about this fact:

"Make no mistake: getting legitimate and highly valuable, inbound links is not a couch-potato task."

Image optimization: get more visitors by being listed at the very top of Google's search results

Excellent suggestions there, Being social in social networking sites brings us gret exposure to our site, possibly ending getting lots of links from relevant sites.

Thanks for this useful post Majora

Known spammers link to your website.

I dont like this part, since this is out of my control.

So, if anyone wants to hurt you, he could go and submit your website to spam sites!?

What do you think?

Good Work. A well insight into the link building. Quite informative and helpful....Thanks for sharing...

To be honest, I wouldn't worry about that one. While you can certainly control out-bound links on your site (i.e., don't link out to bad neighborhood sites), you can't control inbound links.

If it you could just zap a site for the bad incoming links, you could just rank #1 by spamming all of your competitiors' sites into oblivion. That just won't happen. IMHO, at worst, the in-bound links will be devalued or not counted.

Tom

Originally Posted by Bonus Paradise

Thanks for this useful post Majora



I dont like this part, since this is out of my control.

So, if anyone wants to hurt you, he could go and submit your website to spam sites!?

What do you think?

It's really good source but it shows me some logical mistakes in bing search engine developers mind. Let's say we have competition for number 1 with 10 companies. The competitor makes a very bad site outsite (spam site) links these other 9 sites to lower ranks. How will you detect it? Or he buy a paid link to lower you. You have absolutely no control on with what's and who is linking to you. This item in the list "Known spammers link to your website." should be fully ignored.

thanks a lot for these suggestions, I'm kind of enlightened.

Excellent information, thanks for posting it.

Does anyone know if Bing respects the rel="nofollow" attribute in links? Just curious if that's a Google only thing.

How many backlinks do you normally generate or are needed for a page? I'm personally building backlinks for articles for my site, and yes, it is very time consuming. I'm wondering how many backlinks people are personally generating. My sites are all very young so the only real backlinks I get at this point are the ones I create on other sites myself.

Also curious: of the time you spend on your site's content, what percentage do you spend developing backlinks? For me it has been like 5% but I don't think that's going to be nearly enough. So if it takes me 45 minutes to write a page, I think I'm going to need to spend about 20 more minutes building links, and that should let me build about 5-8 links in 20 minutes after I get efficient.

I did just get Dragon Naturally speaking 11 since it was on sale at BestBuy, and that makes writing articles much faster for me.

Bing, yahoo and google has same behaviour on nofollow. At least they declared so.

You should develop better by relevant backlinks on your subject. And sky is the limit. But if you develop suddenly and high amount of backlinks to a page. It can temporarliy hurt it's rankings (what's called sandbox). I recommend my clients to develop links by a deep linking strategy. %25 to home page %75 to inner pages which has most valuable content and then use some internal linkings via navigation menu's and content (some where inside of it). also links has some weights some links with high pr can be better 100 pr 0 links.

You should keep continue developing links untill one day your content start gettings it's well deserved natural backlinks from visitors. A good content should produce it's backlinks. Got the idea?

Thanks webmastersitesi. That does make sense. I am trying to be patient until people start linking in to my sites themselves. I am trying to keep fresh content articles added daily since my goal is to have lots of original useful content.

One thing I noticed that I think has helped some of my sites, is that one several vBulletin forums, I have anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of posts that I have developed over the years. Some of the forums include your website you enter in your profile in every post you make. On those, Google reports I have like 3,413 pages pointing to my site. But those all link to the homepage.

This is called profile links. But they are alone not enough for big goals. You need to be mentioned alot in social bookmarking sites, some autority sites and blogs. Also the profile links works only non vbseo forums This is another secret advantage of vbseo.

Basically, links are like 'referrals' from other sites back to your site. Bing and other search engines don't really 'trust' what you say your site is about, but do trust what others say your site is about. More links = higher ranks.

Link Building plays a very crucial role in website popularity and ranking ... Nice posting ... all stuff in one place ... thnx for posting