Bing has released some useful link building tips on their blog. The information provided gives some detailed information on how the search engines handle attempts to manipulate search results. I would be fairly certain that Google follows pretty similar logic.
Content
Bing starts by repeating the same that Google has said for years.
“The webmasters who create end user value within their websites, based on the needs of people, are the ones who will see their page rank improve. So where does that value come from? Content. Good, original, text-based content”
Relevancy
The importance links from relevant sites is explained.
Authority sites
Bing explains that links from the most highly regarded, relevant sites are best.
Unnatural Links
Bing then explains that patterns of unnatural links activity can trigger a manual review of a website. They look at:
“the relationships between linked sites, the changes to links over time, which sites link to one another, and so much more”.
“When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction. If the spam rating is high, a site can be penalized with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index.”
They then provide some examples of activity that can get you in trouble. Most of them were old news but two of them are important.
- The number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time
- Many inbound links coming from irrelevant blog comments and/or from unrelated sites
Suggestions for Getting Legitimate Links.
The blog post then provides some hints on how to get what they call “good, legitimate inbound links”. Here is what Bing suggests:
- Develop your site as a business brand and be consistent about that branding in your content
- Identify relevant industry experts, product reviewers, bloggers, and media people and let them know about your site and its content
- Write and publish concise, informative press releases online as developments warrant
- Publish expert articles to online article directories
- Participate in relevant blogs and forums and refer back to your site’s content when applicable (Note that some blogs and forums add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to links created in user-generated content (UGC). While creating links to your content in these locations won’t automatically create backlinks for search engines, readers who click through and like what they find may create outbound links to your site, and those are good.)
- Use social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to connect to industry influencers to establish contacts, some of whom may connect back to you (be sure you have your profiles set up with links back to your website first)
- Create an online newsletter on your site with e-mail subscription notifications
- Launch a blog or interactive user forum on your site*
- Join and participate in relevant industry associations and especially in their online forums
- Ultimately, strive to become a trusted expert voice for your industry and let people know that your website contains your published wit and wisdom
Even I was surprised that they recommend submitting to article directories. I was starting to believe that article directories where less relevant. Matt Cutts – could you please confirm this statement. I’ll have to spend more time on our list of 750 article directories.
I believe that Google has led the way with this type of detection. They would also use these types of methods to identify paid links. They See the complete article of Bing link building tips.