Note: The following is from my LinkBomb Report. But I feel it is important enough that is needed to be include here.
Link Velocity - How Fast Should I Build
Links?
There's a concept called "link velocity" and it concerns how fast a site
gains links. The faster you gain links, the higher you rank. It's possible
Google sees a site that's getting links quickly as a site that's "hot", and
you get rewarded. Gaining links very quickly can often be "natural" and a
sign of popularity.
Then, your site quits getting links, or gets them much slower and your ranking drops accordingly.This could be mistaken for the infamous "sandbox", but it's more of a glass half full/half empty point of view. Your site isn't being penalized, instead it is no longer being rewarded for having high link velocity.
The general wisdom was to create links slowly, over time. The thinking is that you should be links slowly and surely. If you go to fast, your site will end up the the Google "sandbox" (disappear for a few months).
One more time, link velocity is just a theory...But it is something to think about. And, the more sophsticated the SEOers, the more likely they discuss link velocity.
We talk all the time about getting links "naturally". But what is natural? Isn't it natural for some sites to get exposure on national TV, then get flooded with traffic and links in a short time? Or written up in a major magazine or newspaper? Wouldn't links gained from these events be "natural"?
Why is it natural for a page to get links gradually, at a steady pace, over a period of time?
It's just my opinion, but it would seem that the "natural" way sites and pages get links is that they'll get more links when they are first posted, with the "link velocity" declining over time.
With everything considered, my advice is to get links as fast as you can, assuming you can maintain that pace for a period of time.
You also need to get links from a wide variety of sources and blend many other strategies to make them look more "natural". Most webmasters seem to rely on only one or two linking strategies, which may be the real problem of the "sandbox".
Whether valid or not, you should at least consider the theory of link velocity. Build sites, blogs and Squidoo lenses and test the principle of Link Velocity. Build links at different speeds to different network resources of your's and test it for yourself...Just don't accept that building links slowly and surely is the "best" route to take, without checking it out for yourself.
This is why we build gold, silve and tin sites...We use the tin sites to test (in addition to building links).
You can increase your links, traffic and reach this way without worrying about if you're getting links to your original site too fast or too slow.
TrustRank
Trust Rank is how Google determines the value of a link. How well respected
are the sites that link to you?
Every link to your pages doesn't have the same value. For example, links from domains using .gov or .edu were thought to be more highly respected by Google than links from other extensions. Google's logic was that links from .gov and .edu aren't available to everyone and therefore have more "trust".
(This is further blurred by the possibility that SEOers have exploited this, so the value of .edu and .gov links may not be as powerful as they once were.)
Other sites may also be "whitelisted" and thus their links carry more weight, such as respected sites like cnet.com, Yahoo's paid directory, DMOZ/ODP, etc.
Other factors that could determine "Trust" that are "on site":
How long ago was the domain name registered?
How many years in the future has your domain name been paid?
Is the whois info hidden? If yes, what are you hiding?
How long has your site been up?
How long have the pages been published?
Do you have 50,000 pages all with the same creation date and time? How'd you do that?
Hilltop is a complex system believed to be used by Google. Without going into the gory details, understand the concept that the relationship between two sites can influence how much impact linking between the two sites has.
For example, the links between two sites that are known to be "affiliated" won't/shouldn't count as much as a link from a totally "unaffiliated" site.
"Affiliation" in this case is simply any biased relationship. This relationship can be determined by:
When building your network, try to understand the basics of Hilltop and link "unaffiliated" pages together. Try to be "stealthy" and not put affiliate info on everything you own.
This is another example of why third party resources can be so powerful. Try to play a little "spy vs. spy" and keep who owns the sites and pages as secret as possible.
Also understand that if you log into your Blogger account and your AdSense account on the same PC, Google probably knows you're the same person. So, if it's a Google property, play it straight and don't be as aggressive.
The use of third party hosting, such as free blogs, Squidoo, Hubpages, etc, are great for helping you hide your "affiliations". All of your resources don't share the shame host, IP or name servers. And, you don't need to register domain names, which use your personal info.
Plus, you save tons of money on hosting and buying domain names!
Deep Linking
Deep linking is the ratio of links to a site that link to the homepage or
to interior pages.
For example, if half of all the links to your site link to your home page and half link to your other pages, you'd have a deep link ratio of 50% to your home page.
The more pages on your site, the lower the deep link ratio should be to you home page and higher to your other pages.
It's important that at least 50-70% of your links are deep links and point to pages other than your home page.
Clustered vs Contextual Linking
A contextual link is like the one below:
"Hi, my name is Kurt and I have an internet marketing
software site
with tons and tons of great application."
It's "contextual" because the link is contained in the content itself.
Here's an example of "clustered" links:
link 1
link 2
link 3
-OR-
link 1 | link 2 | link 3
See how clustered links are all "alone"?
You'll usually see these links all by themselves over in a side-bar, navigation table, or at the top and bottom of web pages.
Contextual links probably give a lot more value than clustered links. When using your network, use contextual links as much as possible.
If you pay for links, INSIST on contextual links...
Link Co-Citation and "Sacrificial
Links"
You know the old saying, "You're known by the company you keep."? This applies
to links all over the web.
You've probably heard that linking to "bad neighborhoods" (spammy, low ranking pages) is bad. If we agree with this, then logically we may think that linking to good pages is a good thing. And it is very likely we inherit some of the good or bad from the pages we link to.
Not only that, we may also inherit the good/bad of other pages by merely sharing the same page. This is the main concept of Co-citation.
Let's say SiteC links to both SiteA and SiteB. Even though SiteA and SiteB are NOT directly linked, Google will use this "citation" and say the pages are probably related to some degree, simply because they both have links from SiteC.
I suggest you take advantage of this by using what I call "sacrificial links". These are links to pages on sites that are so big and have so much authority, trust and link juice that adding a few more links won't change anything.
Our goal is to "sponge" some of the "good" these sites have created and spread it to my own sites and pages.
For example, I have a site about pets and wildlife at www.lizardz.com . There's a few sites in this niche that are so big and powerful, I will never over-take them. Sites like NationalGeographic.com, AnimalPlanet.com, etc. These even have their own TV stations in the US.
So what I want to do is add links to these highly respected sites all over my network, and at the same time include links to my own www.lizardz.com at the same time.
This will give my own site "co-citations" with the heavy-weights. It will also give the pages containing links to the heavy-weights the ability to inherit some of the "juice" those pages have earned. Again, if linking to bad sites is bad, let's assume linking to good sites is good.
Not only can we inherit many of the SEO benefits, we are also branding our own gold sites. If my www.lizardz.com site is listed next to NatiionalGeographic and AnimalPlanet and plastered all over my network, then people will start seeing my site as an EQUAL.
This is heavy stuff...
Some links are considered better than others. For example, getting a link from a page with a PR6 is better than a link with PR0...And it probably is.
Also, links from sites hosted on .edu and .gov are considered to be "good" links, and it's quite possible they are.
There's a lot of webmasters that only seek out high PR links. However, getting only "good" links isn't the optimal way to get links.
I know a very hard core SEOer that constantly tested and researched everything he possibly could. What he found was that a natural pattern was FAR BETTER for getting links than was just concentrating on "good" links.
His tests showed that have a ratio of ABOUT 40-50: 1 was optimal.
This means that for every "good" link, such as .edu, .gov or PR5+, you should have about 40-50 links from pages with low PR, such as PR1, PR2.
And this makes sense...How natural is it for a site to only have PR5+ links
pointing to it? It smacks of SEO manipulation.
Be a Chick
This same hard core SEOer also reports that you will double and even triple your link exchange sucess if the person contacting other webmasters is a woman.
As a matter of fact, this person hires a number of women that do nothing but call webmasters in order to get high quality links.
His advice is, if you exchange links, either pretend to be a woman or have a woman do it for you.
Controlling PR/Link Juice -
NOFOLLOW
You can control and manipulate link juice on your own pages through your
link structure.
For example, if you have the following pages:
TOS | About us | Contact | Disclaimer
You may not want to pass on link juice to these pages and save that juice for your real money pages. All you need to do is add the NOFOLLOW tag to the links of pages you don't want to pass link juice to:
A typical link to your TOS page may look like:
<A HREF="TOS.html">TOS</A>
Just add the nofollow tag like this:
<A HREF="TOS.html"
rel="nofollow">TOS</A>
Same thing for affiliate links and other similar links...
...And you can conserve your link juice to pass on to other pages.
Also, you should structure your site to take advantage of this concept. After doing your keyword research, you should have a list of your "best" keywords. Build pages focused on these keywords, then create other pages to build links to these pages.
You want every page (or as many as possible) to point to your "best pages". But, you only want as few links as possible to point to your "other" pages, focusing all the link juice possible onto your "money" pages.
Just structuring your own internal linking strategy correctly can give your "money" pages a nice boost in the Engines.
WARNING: Google may have cracked down on "PR scultping", which is the art of focusing the PR of your site's pages on certain pages. Don't over-do PR scultping. But do use nofollow on any affiliate links.
Use my Followz Tuel to control and maximize your PageRank.
Canonical URLs
This concerns that URLs can be written differently, even though they all
point to the same place. For example, all of the following are the same
page:
That's 6 different URLs that are technically correct, that all point to the same page.
However, Google will see these as 6 different pages, although Google has been trying to correct this for years.
This means, any links you get can be divided between all 6 variations, diluting any link juice you're trying to build.
To some degree you can control this by always using the same formal to link to your sites and pages. If you use www. once, you need to use it every time.
Problem is, you can't control how others link to you. This means you may not be getting all the link juice you could be getting from the same number of links.
There's a couple of technical solutions. But if you are technical enough, you don't need my help. If you aren't technical enough, I'm not techy enough to help you.
What you need to do is ask your admin or host to either set up a "301 redirect" or create an .htaccess file for you that accounts for "Canonical URLs".
If they are good, it should be easy for them and shouldn't cost more than $10-20, if they won't do it for you for free. This should create an .htaccess file which you can use for your other domains on that same host.
If you want to try and do it yourself, you can google the following:
While a little techy for most, it is a great advantage for the linkers/SEOers that take the time...