Google always have to trade off the balance between authority and topicality, for the lack of the better word. If somebody types in ‘viagra’, which is one of the most spammed terms in the world, you want something that’s about Viagra, not just something that has a lot of authority, like Newsweek, Times that is talking about writing an article with one mention of Viagra, where they say ‘Oh, this is something like Viagra’, you know, just a throw off phrase.
You want authority, sites that are trustworthy, that are reputable. But you also want topicality, you don’t want something that is off topic. You want it to be about what the user typed in.
We try to find the good balance there, so I would try to say, have a well-rounded site. Great content has to be foundation of a good site, because mediocre tends not to attract exceptional links by itself.
If you try to get exceptional links on a really, really crappy content, you’re going to be pushing uphill, it’s going to be harder to get those links. You’re going to have to do stuff that we consider bad for the web, like paying for them. It’s much better to have great content where you get those links naturally, and then you get both – you get great content and you get great links, than trying to have something that is really not that interesting and try to push, push and bug people, send out those spammy emails and ask for links, those sorts of things.
You want to have a well-rounded site, and one of the best ways to do it is to have fantastic, interesting, useful content, great resources, great information and then that naturally attracts the links.
Search engines want to reflect the fact that web thinks that you are interesting or important or helpful.
Related posts:
- If you have inbound links from reputable sites, but those sites do not show up in a link:webname.com search, does this mean you are not getting any “credit” in Google’s eyes for having inbound links?
- Do you feel that the widespread and blanket use of nofollow tags is devaluing Google’s search algorithms? Examples such as Wikipedia, where ALL external links are nofollow. Does Wikipedia mean nothing to Google’s algorithms? Do Google take into account quality factors from nofollowed links when the links come from the well established authority websites, such as Wikipedia?
- Does anchor text carry through all 301 redirects? Will there be a penalty for sites that do this as their sole way of link building?
- Seeing as the “link:” search query is hardly ever accurate, what would your favorite/preferred way to check for inbound links be if you were a webmaster?
- Will Google consider Yahoo! Directory and BOTW as sources of paid links? If no, why is this different from another site that sell link ?
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Great post Vedran! Your post on howtomakemyblog was one of the best articles I’ve read in a very long time, and I read a lot of posts! I am glad I found your site!