artificial linking at info carnivoreI wanted to do an article on artificial linking. This was something I came across in my endless thirst for knowledge on how to improve rankings on Google. I don’t really believe the correct term is artificial linking for what people are describing them as. The correct term would be irrelevant links. Artificial links implies that the links are fake, or counterfeit. I think what these people mean is irrelevant links.

Putting PageRank aside, the formula for success within Google is pretty simple, become an authority on a subject. The key to success is providing your readers with relevant useful information that encourages webmasters to link to that information without being paid to do so.

There are two main types of artificial linking or irrelevant linking. One way to do this is to purchase links through many of the different places that encourage link brokering. I refuse to link to any of these places because you can be penalized for linking to ‘bad neighborhoods’ and I would consider linking to any of these link brokers a bad idea. The other source of artificial or irrelevant linking is blog comments. I have no objections to people using blog comments to get their name out there or to add useful information to the topic at hand, but the problem is that many webmasters believe that by adding hundreds, and in many cases thousands of links across dofollow blogs, is going to somehow magically increase their PageRank and rankings in Google. Posting a comment at the bottom of this article with a link to your site for ‘hair club for men’ or ‘payday loans’ is going to have little if any effect on your search engine rankings.

Posting a comment at the end of this article with a link to your website about Google, PageRank, or linking is going to provide the users and Google with more useful information on the topic. Google continues to tell people that it is the quality of the links, not the quantity of the links that is important, and not to focus on PageRank but it seems many times to fall upon deaf ears. There are countless resources on how to increase your search engine rankings, but a lot of them are filled with unsubstantiatedinformation and theories that cannot be backed by fact because Google keeps their algorithm so secret. One of these theories that I have is that you can obtain a fraction of PageRank by linking out to high quality sources of information. I believe that if you linked in a article on a given topic to several PageRank 4 and higher pages, you would conceivably be able to get your article to a PageRank 1 without having any incoming links. Once again, this is just speculation on my part, but it makes sense. Linking makes the web go ’round. Webmasters should focus on providing useful relevant information and people will continue to link to that information because it is useful not because they might get some Google PageRank out of the link.

The point is that you can spend countless hours spamming links across the Internet, but if those links are not on the same or similar subject matter as the article they are coming from, they will have little effect on improving your site’s rankings. The best links are not the ones that you create yourself, but the links that will have the most value are the ones that are given without you even knowing. So if you find something useful… link to it.

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