Link Building, Page Rank and its various facets in SEO activities.

We place huge importance for a link back from .gov and .edu sites because we believe that they are education and government related authority so their reference is taken to be the highest authority when it comes down to link value and search engines like Google and Yahoo places high authority on this. But apart from the title that they have obtained have you have ever wondered how these websites have got such a high Page Rank. Let us take an example of USA Government website http://www.usa.gov which is a perfect PR 10 website but how do you think is the site a perfect PR 10 which is only given to sites like Google and Adobe. I have read that a PR is determined on the kind of back links a particular site gets. So if you are getting links from a .gov site then it is placed a higher value then any other site this is what I have read across most of the blogs and posts. But similarly when we check sites like Google and Adobe. When I check their back links they have lesser number of .gov and .edu sites, which we really give importance to. So what I would like to convey is that it is not always necessary that we have links from an edu and gov sites no doubt the importance that is placed when we receive a .edu,.gov or .org site can provide but that may not be the only factor to get your page a high PR that is if you want to have a PR 6 and above. A .gov or.edu in your back links will have a high relevancy and will have a strong case for the site not to be banned from Search Engines else you have already seen how top sites were penalized in the last Google PR update. I am also happy that now we shall be able to report paid links to Google. There were people who would splurge in millions and millions of dollars and buy links from .gov and .edu sites in order to rank top in Google search results and now you shall be penalized for that. This article is not to discourage users from linking other sites but my objective of writing this article is to point out the fact that it is just not important that we get .gov and .edu sites but it is really very important that we have quality back links and that can happen when we participate in forums and write quality articles and make sure that our website have enough content for other websites to link back to us.

As experts in the industry say that a good linking strategy is very crucial for websites success in Search Engines and for that it is very important that we socially participate in discussions, provide quality content to spiders and induce others to link back to us. Companies hire specialist link builders to generate relevant back links for your websites and they may indulge into link building through reciprocal and three way link building. Initially this might help but what about the long run. Google seems to be smarter then some of the individuals. Though being a machine we may not be able to manipulate results like we do in excel and words. It is checking each and every action of ours. Generally what these link builders do is that they have a good network of other link builders and then they exchange links for other links. A PR site for PR site is what they do. They may not even check the category in which the links are being placed. I have seen this happen with one of my sites. I had assigned the job to a link builder when I was in my initial days of SEO. In the very first month I had somewhere around 75 back links that was sought of great and I was thrilled as I had read somewhere that more the number of back links better the rankings. I did not check the quality and what they meant for my site’s ranking. It happened like this for a couple of months and then I started to see a decline in the results of my site the PR dropped from 5 to 3. I hired an extra individual who can provide me with good PR sites as I thought it must be due to a Google PR update and also bought links worth some 100 dollars from some high PR sites. Sooner did I found that the PR had dropped from 3 to 0 that is when I started to find out the reason for this and to my surprise it was because of high number of links that we had obtained through link builders. They had brought links from link farms and doorway pages as these pages were of High PR and when Google filtered this out my website was also penalized for that. I threw a lot of emails to webmasters and resubmitted sitemap and did the other on page optimization but to no avail. That is when I read on one of the posts about the Bad linking strategies and what are the do ‘s and don’t for linking and that is where I read that how these link builders choose bad quality links as the only parameter for them is PR and the moment they see a high PR site they will jump upon to catch a link on that which is bad. A good strategy is what I mentioned in the earlier part of my article Quality Content and making sure that you are being discussed on the web. My article does not aim to target link builders but it aims to educate them and what are the do’s and don’ts of link building.

I hope my article provides an ample light to those people who want to get their sites to rank top on Search Engines with some White hat SEO practices but still your comments are what I am looking for.