…and sometimes they can bring you sorrow.

Links to your site are one of the most important factors used by the Search Engines in deciding whether your site is listed #1 or #500 for any given search phrase. (I previously discussed the importance of ranking using the AOL data.)

Every link to your site found on the Internet counts as 1 ‘vote’. Oh, didn’t you know? Democracy rules on-line!

It’s an Election Every Day

Just like in the real world not everyone’s vote is equal, and rigging the count isn’t as difficult as you might imagine.

So which votes count more than others? Well they happen to be the votes that the counters ‘trust’. In our case that means links from websites that the Search Engines ‘trust’.

Who Do You Trust?

Link ‘trust’ is a function of a number of factors, but suffice to say that older websites that contain shed loads of quality content and are linked to by similar sites would generally be trustworthy.

One Person, One Vote?

In the real world each individual should have just one vote. It doesn’t quite work like this in the virtual world. On the Internet it is easy enough to vote over and over again.

Search Engines count links to determine how popular you are (link popularity). But more importantly, they check the anchor (this is an anchor) text to decide what your popular for.

Working The Phrase

The key to getting listed in most Search Engines for any given search phrase is to have enough links pointing at your site containing that phrase in the anchor text.

If you want your site to rank well for ‘purple monkey dishwasher’ then you would try to create as many links as possible (on trustworthy sites of course) pointing at your site using the anchor ‘purple monkey dishwasher’.

Google Bombing

Creating an overwhelming number of links is referred to as ‘Google Bombing’, the most famous examples of which are failure and liar.

And closer to home, it appears that a certain broadband lobbying group may have inspired its own mini Google bomb for the term ‘telecoms poodle‘. Well deserved it is.

So now you know that the anchor can be your friend, but it can also be your enemy. Just ask Comreg!