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What About Word-of-Mouth Linking?
November 09, 2004
I just read an interesting article at WebProNews called "Are Links Hurting Search Relevance"?
From an end user point of view, I think that all the emphasis in SEO these days on linking in order to boost Pagerank and search results is definitely having an impact on search relevance. Which means that Google is probably busy working on another way to ensure proper relevance in its search results.
I find it interesting that you don't actually hear too much about "word-of-mouth" linking. Everyone writes about how to find proper link partners, how to manage your link exchanges, how to make sure people are linking to you the way they said they would, and how to make sure you don't have a bad outbound link that could get you penalized.
It seems to me that working on things that will emphasize word-of-mouth linking - whether it's writing articles for other sites, expert articles for your own site, offering a highly valued "freebie" of some sort or any other creative way of creating a quality site that others clamour to link to - represents a search strategy that focuses on long-term stability.
As long as the search engines regard site relevance as the main priority - and I'm not sure why they wouldn't, since it's what we, the end users, demand - concentrating on creating a highly relevant site that gets a lot of inbound links through word-of-mouth should always work.
Granted, it sounds more time-consuming and labor-intensive than concentrating on reciprocal linking. But then again, when you compare it to managing hundreds of link partners, is it really all that much more work? Especially when you consider the good chance that the search engines will adapt to this current challenge and create better ways of determining true relevance - leaving reciprocal links devalued or neutralized in the long run.
- BJ
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Posted by BJ at 09:49 PM in SEO | Permalink
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Comments
"It seems to me that working on things that will emphasize word-of-mouth linking - whether it's writing articles for other sites, expert articles for your own site, offering a highly valued "freebie" of some sort or any other creative way of creating a quality site that others clamour to link to - represents a search strategy that focuses on long-term stability."
I totally agree. Some of my best link partners are the ones who initated the link exchange (or posted a non reciprocal link) because they valued the site content.
Sandra
Posted by: Sandra | Nov 15, 2004 8:08:06 PM
