SEO Requires The Slow Approach

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 20 of September , 2008 at 7:54 am

One of the mantra’s of SEO is link building. The real key is to it as quickly as possible, but not too quickly. If you acquire a rush of links, search engines, particularly Google, will quickly smell a rat and brand your site spammy, result, no indexing.

News around the grapevine the last few days has confirmation of Google’s approach to spamming for links and a little bit about to detect them. SERoundTable has a good rundown on what Google has to say on the matter. However the following statement sums up Google’s approach:

A typical, “legitimate” document attracts back links slowly. A large spike in the quantity of back links may signal a topical phenomenon (e.g., the CDC web site may develop many links quickly after an outbreak, such as SARS), or signal attempts to spam a search engine (to obtain a higher ranking and, thus, better placement in search results) by exchanging links, purchasing links, or gaining links from documents without editorial discretion on making links.

Building back links slowly does not always sit with website owners all that well. However, given the choice between a slightly slower indexing and ranking speed and no indexing or ranking, I know which directions I would prefer.

It is hard to impress upon owners the need to slow down on their search engine optimization activities sometimes. It often needs a statement like this one from Google to reinforce ‘the rules’ and reduce some of the aggressive activities.

It does leave me to wonder on aspect of quick link building. The spammers that attack sites, particularly blogs, try to build hundreds of links each day. Perhaps we should leave the comments for a month or two and see if Google then drops them from the index. Then we could remove the offending comments - but then, who has the time.

                      Category: SEO