SEO: Google’s New Linking Patent
Is Google up to something?
A new patent, "Determining Quality of Linked Documents," was granted on August 24, though I'm guessing that Google has been employing this tactic right along. They filed for the patent way back in 2004, and it clearly illustrates that your backlinks are important, but more important is where they're coming from.
Not really news. We have known for some time that links back from what Google considers to be "bad neighborhoods" can hurt your page rank. So, what does this patent prove?
One thing is that Google views links from one of your sites to another of your sites rather "all in the family." They won't weigh links from your own sites linking back to you as heavily as they will links coming into your site from outsiders.
In order to circumvent that, you could probably set up hosting on separate "c" class servers and register domains under separate accounts under different names. PFFFT!!! That's way too much trouble, and it's not terribly productive, but it can work.
It's also how all the highly-touted "link wheels" work. You can set up a ring of buffer sites, feed them links from outside, and have the buffer sites doing all kinds of non-Google friendly things that spread the link juice to your money site without fear of retribution. These take a long time to set up, and you have to be careful. If you're using "black hat" techniques, you're bound to be caught at some point and so building this elaborate system has to be done so that losing one of the cogs in the system is not a big deal if it's easily replaced. You have almost be Houdini to get these wheels working, but it can be done and apparently, they do work… for a while.
You can also participate in linking "schemes" as Google terms them, and they hate those, too. Anything that artificially manipulate search results is a big, fat black mark from them. So, if you join in some of these systems, be very careful. The last thing we want as marketers is to be shut out of Google for good. It's not at all a good place to be. Who knows, Bing may rise up and take over one day, but their rules aren't very far different. All search engines want the best results for searchers, not what some marketers serve up to them.
The best links are "do follow" links pointing back from third-party sites like Squidoo, for example. Blog commenting is always good for some quality backlinking, too. Just be sure these are blogs that are "relative" to your niche. For example, if you're in the golf niche, commenting on an "how to make money" blog wouldn't be terribly helpful. Yet, a solid link back from a "stranger" site will definitely carry more weight than one you own. Not surprising at all, eh?
So, this just says that the quality of your links is much more important than the quantity of them. Links from high page-ranked pages are more valuable, as are links from outside sources. This isn't to say that you should stop linking to your own sites. Just realize that the links won't have as much clout as those from other places.
