Understanding External Back links

Today, Let's tackle external back links and try to understand how they help us. This article may have more concepts than solutions. You need concepts before you may accept the solution. I will make suggestions later.

External back links affect your PR and search page position. External links are used by Google to determine if you are a person of "authority." If you have quality back links, Google assumes you are an important player in the real estate world. If Google believes you are an important player in the area of Real Estate, you will be given priority when Google returns search results for real estate questions in your area.

Now, the question is, what is a quality link, how should you seed them and what happens when your links are not quality links?

Quality links come from important sites. Important sites for obtaining back links have a PR of 5,6, 7, ... not 0, 1, and 2. Identifying important sites is far more involved than that simple statement, but, it is a start. There may be an important site with PR of 0, but, for the moment we will ignore that and simply say, "I think you can guess who is and is not important for your PR." We will come back to who is important later.

What happens if you do not have link backs from important sites? You have to work much harder. If you can get 10 quality site links, you may have to get 200 from low quality sites to get the same benefit. The number of links you need is determined by the quality of your back links. You may be able to get a high PR and search results by creating 12,000 (arbitrary number for discussion) back links from lots of low quality sites and require only 100 high quality back links. The number of back links you need will depend on the number and quality of the back links of your competition for individual search phrases.


If you have 10 link backs from 10 different sites, it is likely you will get more PR benefit than if you get 10 link backs from one site. This does not imply that 10 link backs from one site is bad, it simply reflects Google's preference for seeing you are popular over a wider number of sites.

If you have 10 back links from one site, you may not get much more benefit for having 100 back links from that site. There is a point where Google assumes that a site is biased in creation of back links and will depreciate the value of the links coming from that site. In fact, if the bias becomes too excessive, google may completely ignore all links to your site from that site.

Therefore, If you personally created 10 blog sites, and spent lots of time blogging on those sites and did lots of pointing back to your realty site, you could actually damage your realty site, even if you had thousands of back links coming in from them. At some point Google would decide that the 10 blog sites (with lots of backlinks to your realty site) are biased and Google will depreciate the incoming links from these sites and you will drop back in the search ranks. Don't waste your time.

If you would like to create one external blog site, provide good content on that site and periodically reference your main realty site, that is great. You will get back link benefits, but, don't expect windfall results overnight. For some, this will have a great affect, for others in highly competitive areas, this will have significantly less affect. This may help but, not kick you into a new tax bracket. Note: now that you have an off-site blog, you now have 2 sites to figure out how to market.

If you are creating an external blog or articles at other external articles locations, it is not necessary or even wise to point all your back links to the main page of your realty site. Blog on a variety of topics. If the blog is about condos, point to your realty site page on condos. If you blog is about the wisdom of getting a free home evaluation, point to the free home evaluation on your site. If you are talking about foreclosures, point to your foreclosure page of your realty site. Write multiple blogs on each topic. If you start pointing your external blogs to the interior of your site, more of your internal pages are probably going to start popping up in the return results of searches on the topics. (There is more to know about creating blog entries, but, that will be discussed later. You must understand anchor text.)

Google wants links showing authority to help determine your level of authority/importance. Many realtors believe they can make arrangements with other realtors and create reciprocal links (you point to my site and I will point to your site). Google largely discounts these links. Get some if you like, don't be unfriendly, but, don't expect a windfall of benefit. Google assumes that reciprocal links are just an arrangement between sites and are largely depreciated in value. Google does not want to know you have friends, Google wants to know you are respected as a leader, and reciprocal links are not the key to displaying that in real estate. Note: Some reciprocal links are valid and Google accepts them. If are only one of three companies in Silicon Valley that create interrelated but different medical equipment, reciprocal links between these companies would be considered logical and beneficial by Google. However, a realtors in Australia, Canada and Central America creating reciprocal links just does not make Google have much faith in the authority or importance of any of the reciprocal links.

Google discounts the value of link backs from link farms. You are involved with a link farm if you are involved with a folks that buys dozens or hundreds of domain names, and puts up pages that have nothing more that a long list site name and a link and your site is among the list. Largely, Google ignores back links to your site from link farms. Google assumes these are purchased inclusions and reflect little authority on your part. Little SEO or PR benefit is provided by these lists. If you want to be in a link farm because you believe your link spread out over the internet may accidently direct people to your site, fine, but, don't expect significant SEO benefits from the inclusions in those listings.

So, how should you use backlinks? Make a decision, you will make thousands of low quality back links or you will make an effort to get many fewer high quality links. It is up to you.

So, how should you blog? Blog to the interior of your site as well as to the main page. Don't ad 30 backlinks to your realty site on each blog article, stick to a few using good anchor text from the blog article.

In a few days, I'll try again to discuss more on:
creating back links and creating blog articles.

For now, I am certain I have bent your ear quite enough.