You need two things to rank. You need to be a trusted and a relevant website. More on that shortly.
In the beginning there was on page optimization. People would change their website and get better rankings. Search engines soon learned onpage stuff (stuff on your own websites) was not trusted. Aside: this is why developing links is still more important than changes to your website.
So Google figured out that links or citations from other sources was a good way to rank websites. Links on other people’s websites was more trusted than the content on your own website.
They also created the concept of pagerank. Basically pagerank is a number between 1 and 10 that indicates the weight of the links that point to a page. The more and higher pagerank of the pages that link to your web pages, the higher the page rank will be of your web page. If you then link out to another web page, that recipient webpage will receive some of your page rank. So, page rank flows down through the web via links between pages.
Initially using that pagerank was a good indicator for Google and they used it heavily in ranking. Higher pagerank was better.
Enter the age of reciprocal linking. I link to you, you link to me. More pagerank for both. I run a program that crawls the web and finds other copies of the program and auto-swap links. Result: 10,000 reciprocal links overnight and a really high pagerank fast - and thus a high ranking. Google soon figured out that pagerank alone could not be trusted. Goodbye sites that were doing high volume reciprocal linking.
Enter the digitalpoint network (see the digitalpoint forum link in the sidebar). I enter two sites into the network. Site A has 50,000 pages in it. I run ‘ads’ (links) for 5 other members of the network on each of those 50K pages. so 250K outbound links. In exchange, 250K pages from other sites in the network link back to my site B. Voila - large scale one way linking and great rankings. Yes, those were the good old days.
Google soon found footprints for the network. Goodbye sites that were using the DP network. (Aside: it seems that a site I had in the DP network years ago has actually finally recovered and is now ranking on it’s own again - as of the last couple of weeks).
Enter blogs and paid links. I pay you $30, you write a blog post about my site and include some links. Instant one way links. Google has not really killed this yet, but trust me, Google is DYING to stop this. It’s their #1 crusade right now.
So what is Google trying to do? As noted above, they want to server trusted and relevant sites. The problem is, how do we define trusted and relevant? And how do we stay ahead of the curve of Google finding link schemes? Just remember the mantra: trusted and relevant. Even if you’re not doing exactly what Google’s algorithm is testing for today you’ll be sitting there waiting whe Google’s engineers figure it out. And they’re getting better at it.
Now lets define trusted and relevant. A trusted and relevant website is a website that has trusted and relevant backlinks. How do we know if a site that links to us is trusted and relevant? Simple - they have trusted and relevant backlinks themselves.
But what’s relevant? That’s easy enough. A relevant link is a link from a site that has content related to our website and has links from other relevant sites.
Trusted is a slightly more complex issue. I picture trust this way; trust works like pagerank. It flows through links. We want to build lots of links from trusted sites. That gives us more trust, and a better chance to rank. But how do we know a site is trusted? Simple - a gut check. Look at the backlinks of a site. Are the backlinks full of authority, non-spammy sites? Old sites? Do the sites look trusted? If so - that’s all you can do.
For example, would a link from a low end poker site be trusted? Not likely. What about a link from the government? Absolutely - that’s trusted. And there’s a huge range in between. Just use your head you can tell trust mostly just by looking.
Long boring post I know. But important! Trust and relevance - that’s IT. Everything you do in link development needs to center around these two concepts. It worked 5 years ago, it works today and I expect it will work in another 5 years. Build for stability. If all the trusted and relevant websites say your site is worth referencing, Google will think so too. And even if the factors aren’t being measured explicitly right now, it’s where Google is looking to go - be ready for them. Most importantly, that’s pretty much all you need to know about the why of link building. Now all we need is the how (which will be coming soon).
Remember - build trusted and relevant backlinks. That makes your site trusted and relevant. And you will therefore rank.