Can You Ever Stop Building Links to Your Website?

By Duncan Heath

Most SEOs realise that by and large the distribution of power on the web is dictated by links. In very crude terms, the more links you have and the more powerful the sites are that link to you, the more credibility you will have in the search engines’ eyes, and the better your chances of ranking are – that’s pretty basic SEO.

What is not so simple however is how the age of a link affects the power it yields, and whether you need to keep building links to a site in order to maintain power and rankings? Well, here are a few points to consider:

Domain Age

As with most things in the world of SEO, there is divided opinion on whether the age of a domain has an influence on how much authority it is given by search engines. I think this is a really good post on the subject and without getting into this difficult argument too much, my experience tells me that domain age does matter. If you subscribe to the idea that domain age is an algorithm factor, then if you think about it, link age must be as well. If a domain increases in power over time, then by definition so do the links that are contained on that domain. So I think it is reasonable to suggest that old links pointing to your site increase in power rather than decrease.

Query Deserves Freshness (QDF)

We know that with the arrival of social sites such as Twitter and Facebook, which allow users to search for up to the minute information among their peers, search engines have been pushing to provide more ‘real-time’  and ‘fresh’ results in their SERPS. This spawned the term “Query Deserves Freshness” which basically means that in Google’s ranking algorithm, the ‘freshness’ of a result is taken into consideration (for certain search terms).

As fresh content tends to generate fresh links, there is a clear argument here that you cannot necessarily rely on old links to provide rankings, no matter how widespread or powerful they are.

Using simple logic, if people are not currently linking to content, it’s unlikely that it’s very popular at that time, and probably not what they want to see in search results.  I often see on my surf clothing site for example that the newest pages with the freshest links often outrank my older pages, despite them having a much larger back link profile.

Competition

Lastly, and probably most importantly, competition often forces us to continue our link building activities indefinitely. There is a great expression about link building that states all you need to do to beat your competition in the SERPS is to “match and exceed”. If you can investigate the back link profile of your competition, gain the links they have for your site as well, and then exceed what they have, chances are you will outrank them.  This logic is what drives link build efforts forward and means that you must continue to garner links to your site to prevent being overtaken by the competition.
So in conclusion, old links may get more powerful over time, but if you don’t continue your link building campaigns, you’re likely to get left behind.

Author Information

Duncan Heath is an SEO engineer and Internet marketing expert with over 5 years experience. He runs his own extreme sports site that compares everything from surfboards to flip flops. You can follow his business on Twitter.

3 Things Not To Say To An SEO Client

By Duncan Heath

1. “I Don’t Know”

Let me just caveat this straight away and say that telling your client “I don’t know” is not a bad thing to do. It becomes very bad, however, when you use this phase in isolation and don’t follow it up with anything helpful. SEO clients tend to believe that you should know anything and everything about websites, the Internet and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Whether they expect more of their consultants than in other industries…I can’t say…but it sure feels like it sometimes.

When you are asked an SEO question that you don’t know the answer to, you should of course not try to wing it and make out like you do. This technique usually has two different variations:

1.)    Make out like the client is an idiot for not knowing the answer themselves as it’s so obvious, and shame them into never asking again.

2.)    Start talking gobbledygook about CSS, viewstate, algorithms and noindex commands until the client loses the will to live and moves on.

The best thing to do is admit that you’re unsure of the answer but you will find out for them and let them know as soon as you can. This will not only let them know you are honest, but that you want to help and you know how to find the answer. What more could a client want?

2. “That’s Just Google”

Most SEOs know that Google is heavily relied upon to provide traffic, often more heavily than is comfortable to be honest. Unfortunately, due to Google’s dominant market share we have to play the game and hedge our bets by focusing a lot of our time optimising for this search engine.

Whilst the Big G can be the provider great wealth, it can also take this away in a fell swoop with one or more changes to its algorithm. Largely speaking, if you play by the rules you should be okay, but we’ve all experienced in the past some drops in rankings or traffic that have come as a surprise and need investigating.

When this happens, possibly the worst (and most patronising) thing you can say to a client is “that’s just Google, sometimes it does that”. This is not helpful in the least and does not instill confidence in the client. They know that every effect has a cause, and if you don’t understand the cause then you will not be able to alter the effect. If you don’t know the answer, offer some possible solutions, but again tell the client that you will research the problem, get to the bottom of it, and work to put it right.

3. “But look at the traffic!”

Believe it or not clients aren’t interested in rankings. They’re not interested in links, and they aren’t even interested in traffic. So what are they interested in?

…Money…

A client pays you to do a job and they expect that job to provide more money to them in return. It’s very simple, and yet lots of SEO’s forget this, instead getting hung up on ranking number 1 for a big term or delivering 100 percent more traffic each month. If you are not making your clients a positive return on investment (ROI), there are no metrics in the world you can throw at them that will make them happy.

Author Information

Duncan Heath is a marketing expert working for a Tanda client, who specialises in offering solicitar credito (loan applications) in Mexico. He writes about all things web and client management.