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Back Links Marketing Search Engines

Backlinks are Everything.

I guess I am only just starting to learn the fine art of earning passive income online. One of the blind spots I had for a long time was that “content is king” – “write good stuff and they will come”. Well actually: they won’t, and in fact even when they do they may only make you 7c / day which is not going to see you retire in style any time soon.

There is only oneย  way for the bulk of your potential audience to find you: that is Google. Yes there are other search engines Yahoo probably sends me 5% of what Google does and MSN about 5 (no not % just 5 ๐Ÿ™‚ ). But Google is king of the search engines

You see Google don’t find your wonderful hub or article or website or blog by accident. It certainly doesn’t decide to put your site on the first page of results except for some very specific reasons.

  1. Google needs your content. Try this type “lis sowerbutts” – without the quotes into Google what comes back – this site normally ranks #1. At the moment in the Australian data centre of Google I rank #1 and #2 of 493,000 results: cool eh? Well no not really – lets face it “lis sowerbutts” isn’t exactly a high competition set of words – there aren’t that many sites around so I end up at the top because a) the name is in my url of this blog and b) and often comment and link to Lis Sowerbutts – an anchored link on the name of the blog
  2. Google thinks you have “authority”. Think about it if you have a problem with your car who do you call a: qualified mechanic or Uncle Ed who mucks around with motors –ย  OK, if they were both the same price you would call the “authority”. If you want the perfect smoked fish recipe do you check out Hub Pages or some site you never heard of: you go to Hub Pages because you know there is some great recipes there but even if I didn’t if I search via Google I will find hubpages often on the first page Why? Because Google “likes” Hub Pages. Which actually means that the Google algorithm basically gives Hub Pages the benefit of the doubt and indexes and ranks hubs quickly. Look carefully at what shows up most often on the first page of Google when you search for generic information: about.com, hubpages.com squidoo.com and almost always 1st or 2nd wikipedia.com. These sites have authority: just like you should listen to your Mum you should also probably listen to wikipedia or hubpages!

So how do you get that “authority” from Google? Well that is how

Backlinks are King

Try this: go to Google and type in

link:http://mywebsite.com

this will give you a list of all the sites which link back to your site.Well all the ones that google have got around to counting anyway, which can take anywhere from hours to months.

If you don’t have a profile or a website which has been around a few months try mine as an example link:http://hubpages.com/profile/Lissie
at the moment about 125 links. But look at those links: tags some of my hubs have, people I am a fan of, comments I have paid of hubs (my own or others), posts I have made in the forums. Being active on HubPages creates lots of backlinks to your profile and you can see the effect that my profile now has a Page Rank (PR) of 4. Basically the more links you have pointing at a page the more important Google considers it and the more likely you are to rank well in a search for that term.

8 replies on “Backlinks are Everything.”

In my experience, it’s not the number of backlinks but the quality of those links. I’ve got some pretty old domains, one particularly, that seems to be really trusted with Google. A link from it is all it seems to take to get me ranked high with my other sites. That and letting the other sites age as well. Some of my sites were nowhere to be seem for six months to a year and then, pow, number one or two for my keywords. Maybe I have lots of links I don’t know about but I’ve never gone on link exchange or link building missions with any of them.

Thanks for commenting Travoholic. Age is definitely good – once you have a site or 2 that have authority and PR it makes life a lot easier. I am finding though on another domain of mine which is new I can get a post indexed in less than 1 hour and I am sure that is because of the 1000’s of back links it has. I don’t think there is any reason why you can’t have both!

Lissie, I’m glad someone bumped your thread on hubpages so I could find your blog! I tried your trick for searching link: etc. and saw the results for you, but nothing for me…not sure what I’m doing wrong, but then I have lots to learn about this online writing gig! Thanks for sharing!

I should have been clearer Dineame: to see which backlinks google recognises for your site go to google.com and in the search bar enter:
site:http://myurl.com

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