(Slightly off my usual topic… but it relates to writing web content…)
It’s the Holy Grail of Website ownership: high traffic. Since its inception, the Internet has promised us instant gratification and ROI fantasies unimagined in human experience. High traffic, of course translates roughly into more conversions, that is, customers who purchase services and or products, which in tune equals more revenue. However, real life has shown again and again that the fantasy is hard to make a reality.
Back in the beginning, those primordial moments of the internet’s existence, meta-tags and few well thought search engine submissions were enough to get you going full speed on the information super highway. We all knew that couldn’t last. By 2003, there were six web pages for every person on the planet – more than 36,000,000,000. That, of course, was before dynamically generated pages, which can increase a website’s size exponentially (I’m currently working on SEO for a project that has more than 1,000,000 pages – sites of this size are common place in 2010).
The rules, like the Internet, were always evolving. Fast-forward a decade, virtual millennia by Internet standards and we find ourselves with a whole new idea: Link Juice.
The technical term is “website authority” or as Google terms it, “Page Rank.” Link Juice is one of the myriad factors that Google (and let’s face it, no one else matter – not Yahoo, not Bing) uses to determine the top, non-paid slots for organic search. Link Juice is a metric of how many people link to any given website. Back links are unsolicited and therefore of more value when determining authority. The logic is sound – if enough people link to your site, you must know something of value and in turn, should receive a higher “page rank” when people perform searches. Most of the time this works quite well.
Upon further consideration, it seems as if this model could easily be manipulated. However, the ever-clever minds at Google have taken precautions to prevent what would be otherwise an inevitable exploitation. Google’s indexing spiders and bots assign different value to links based on where they appear within a web page as well. The ever popular “blog roll” link widget has significantly less potency than a direct link within body copy. Just another one of the many means by which Google prevents exploitation of it’s indexing model. This, coupled with the naturally Darwinian nature of online content makes a solid model for determining page rank.
The next question obviously, is “how can I take advantage of that?” Many enterprising SEO expert have some with elaborate models o “link wheels,” fake sites set up to point to specific URLs, which in turn point to others, which theoretically accumulate Link Juice like an avalanche. Google however, can see right through these no-so-complex schemes. Research indicates than only back links from juices sites add to your own juice. The solution is simply to get popular, authoritative sites to review your product, service, or whatever, and then post about it – giving you a back link in the copy.
