After stumbling across a competitors attempt at link building, let’s just say that now I know why Google enforces quality control in context to contrived off page SEO and off page ranking factors.
Link Building and Off Page Ranking Factors
Out of professionalism, no names will be revealed, let’s just say that the companies grasp of the English language was pushing the bounds of gibberish and sprinkled with whimsical words that had no meaning or context. Take into consideration that search engines are programmed to interpret natural language, so, aside from words being haphazardly flung together in an attempt of tricking them to inflate popularity, they will more than likely hit the penalty box or acquire a deficit in relevance score.
A website’s topics should be synchronized to maximize ranking factor. An example is, a blog about health and fitness should not be talking about lawyers or drain pipe removal; unless you want that site to get labeled with a low relevance score (organic SEO’s rendition of quality score) for health tips or related topics.
If the topic is “all over the place” then the theme and purpose of that website loses the ability to define itself as an authority. A website with authority has more flexibility as far as topic, however, when building relevance, its better not to hemorrhage inconsistencies or diffuse a sites topic.
Trusted Sites Rank Better
Sites that have acquired trust or rankings for competitive keywords serve a dual purpose. They are destinations (for providing useful and unique content) as well as potential hubs (meaning they act as a springboard to other locations).
For on page and off page ranking factor acquiring domain trust is the objective of SEO. Without it, your content (on the preferred site and landing page) will never reach critical mass or rather reach the necessary velocity and momentum needed to break lose of the inertial elements inherently working against it.
The primary elements opposing your pages ascent are 1) your competition and the technical prowess they implement 2) the volume of themed content fighting for that keyword 3) the volume or lack of website popularity (how popular the site is) and how authoritative it is as a result of the link graph and peer review ultimately determine its degree of buoyancy in the search engine result pages.
All pages start from zero, however, depending on the strength of the domain (such as a website replete with a robust array of themed content) can acquire an ambient type of momentum through collective transference and slice through competitive keywords like a hot knife through butter through marginal off page inbound link / augmentation.
What Do Search Engines Reward?
From experience, we know that search engines historically reward seasoned domains with abundance of unique content, groomed and logical site architecture (all posts, pages or articles in their proper place) as well as respected endorsement from other authoritative websites.
If you plan to succeed and do more than just spreading gibberish around in an automated fashion in an attempt to fool search engines and create relevance, then think again. The more competitive the keyword, the more precise and technically savvy your off page factors need to be to pass relevant link flow to the target page.
The dubious “punches in bunches” /wild west mentality of inundating search engines with the same content from thousands of domains through syndication is virtually losing its edge. In addition, site propped up by such castles made of sand will find their positions in jeopardy and risk receding off to pages no human will dare visit.
Considering 91% of all searchers never go past the first page, its better to focus on quality off page factors to ensure a stable or ascending trajectory vs. tarnishing your websites reputation from hanging out with bottom of the barrel scraper sites or sites that offer little if any editorial value. Which means if you want to succeed with off page SEO then quality content is mandatory as well as acquiring a higher caliber of link flow from other sites through themed links and themed topical continuity.
That was an interesting article. Thanks for sharing.
Nice post, basic important things.
I reccommend using sites like http://www.similarsites.com to search your segment.
Thanks for pointing out what search engines search for in this post. It help website owner to stop wasting time of tactics that just don’t work!
It has become increasingly apparent that some SEO’s will jam as much content into a page as they can without any thought to what they are selling and who the target audience is. It is even more remarkable at how irrelevant some pages are, or how off topic they are in comparison to their meta tags. I believe if a user can’t figure out in 10 seconds what you are selling or what your company is about you have failed in finding a customer, and failed in having a search engine finding you credible. Stay on track to becoming a trusted site requires patience and staying on a narrow path. As you continue down that narrow path it will eventually become a road, then into a 4 lane highway and so on, end result being more traffic.
Great article Jeff, always a good read, and excellent points made.
great post, seo is all about relevant authority.
One thing that I constantly here is “new content”. Unless you are updating a site with new posts, i.e. a blog site – how can you keep up the constant requirements of off-page SEO?
You can go back, add new content to the same pages, refine meta data, add a few additional themed links, etc. Then, instead of relying on the ping method, just update your sitemaps (www.xml-sitemaps.com) and then resubmit to Google, Yahoo or Bing to prompt a fresh crawl.
It is always fascinating to me how so many SEO “guru’s” act like as if obtaining back links is a guarded secret shrouded in mystery. I agree with you and your observations: it takes hard work and good content that does not smell of purchase agreements and canned spam!
This is a solid article filled with good advice and I will return to it frequently I feel certain!
Great article. Thanks for giving us information on what are the important aspect that will help Sites Rank Better from search engine point of view.
Looking forward for more information.
These are the basic things that one has to redefine to achieve some good Alexa rank and Google PR, techniques are the same all the time but the way one use it is most important.
yes
Search Engines obviously preferred the Domain Age and Trusted Links so we should have to focused to get quality of links which has less number of outbound links