Blog Linking Strategy and Google Page Rank

Well, Google finally came through with a page rank update for the Google Toolbar. Not everyone is happy with the update, but that is pretty much true with every google page rank update.

People work hard on their blogs and websites. They read Matt Cutts’ blog. They read the Google blog. And they read everything people are saying about how to get ranked well in Google. They are paying attention to Google.

So when Google does a page rank update, they expect good results from all of their hard work and studying. Inevitably some are happy and some aren’t after an update.

This time around paid links and websites that sell them took a hit. But so did blogs that appeared to be networking their links and groups of blogs that each pretty much have the same exact blogroll.

How do you decide who you will link to? It used to seem as if the low value of reciprocal links didn’t apply to your blogroll. This last update has me convinced that if you are trading links with other blogs, then they are definitely being treated as reciprocal links now even if they weren’t before.

Circle jerks, where you have blog a link to blog b that links to blog c that links to blog d and blog d links to blog a won’t work anymore either.

Google is looking for links they know are relevant to your content and links that were not achieved in any unnatural way.

They won’t get it right all the time and some legitimate blogs will suffer a drop in google page rank even though they do everything right.

So don’t panic. Just keep building real one-way inbound links to your blog and watch that you only link to blogs and websites that really are related to your content.