Link Strategies That No Longer Work

Sunday, Blog Content Provider talked a little bit about link strategy among network blogs. I want to elaborate a little more on that subject today. Specifically, I’ll quote a paragraph from our post that day:

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.

At one time, that was a popular linking strategy. I wouldn’t try it today. The circle jerk strategy came about as a way to circumvent Google’s reciprocal link algorithm. Because reciprocal links are not considered as valuable as one-way links, webmasters invented the the three-way link. Site A links to Site B, which links to Site C. Over time, that got a little more complicated and soon you had circle jerks that consisted of 15 or 20 sites. Well, Google has figured out the game and changed its algorithms to stop that from happening. Surprised?

Don’t be. It’s not the first time and it likely won’t be the last. But there is another type of funky link strategy that you don’t want to try any more and it’s for the same reason. Let’s make it simply by taking six websites lettered from A to F and I’ll illustrate the web-structured link pattern.

• Site A links to Sites B, D, and F
• Site B links to Sites C and E
• Site C links to Sites A, D, and F
• Site D links to Sites B and E
• Site E links to Site A
• Site F links to Sites B, D, and E

Let’s further complicate this by saying that none of the sites are related to each other in content or subject matter. The only thing holding them together is that they are owned by the same person or group of persons. You might as well just get rid of all of these links because they won’t help you, and they might even hurt you in the long run.

The reason is because Google is placing even more importance on relevance with its latest (re: last week) PageRank update. Over the last few months, I’ve noticed fewer and fewer links from some blogs that I own and that are a part of NameCritic’s network were being counted in my link popularity numbers from Google. I became suspicious at the beginning of the summer when I saw links that before were counted and then weren’t. My suspicions proved correct. Google was discounting these links from non-relevant sites with higher PR on the basis of their non-relevance.

What that means on a practical level is that you should link your blog only to other relevant blogs with similar content, or your own website. The practice of linking blogs that are owned by the same person or network of persons isn’t going to be allowed. That means it’s time to get creative, and I mean really creative, with your link patterns.