Search Engine Marketing: Web Developers Forum

Archaic Sage

You search across sites today and they tell you to just get links back to your site. The more you have the better. Well, I disagree partially. You do need back linking, but you need it from relevant and quality areas. Look at phpBB.com, they are ranked first because every phpBB forum has their link on it. It's allowed to be removed, but it's more hassle than it's worth to remove it (well, it's not really. All you need to do is go into overall_footer.tpl and remove it from the bottom). But it's still all relevant links.

Where as you get some sites that are actually full of quality content, but are ignored because of the lack of back links. I find that it's best to maintain a steady balance of back linking and content. As content, after all, is the best way to success.

Lars

I disagree. Backlinks can't possibly hurt your SERPs. However you do bring up a relatively valid point, because the better and more related to your site each individual backlink is compared to your site, the more it will help improve your PR and SERPs.

Of course, the PR of the backlinks also plays a role here.

I believe the only types of link that can hurt your SERPs is out going links to "blacklisted" types of sites, for instance link farms etc.

__________________
Current Projects
[ Lars-Christian dot com ] [ Web Developers Forum ] [ WebDev Blog ]

Archaic Sage

The PR of the backlinks is very important, as you said. But how do you get your PR up anyway? People normally say that Google ignores meta lists. And using dynamic content is detrimental for your PR. But how can it be detrimental if you have some XHTML on the page and the relatively good, spiderable site?

Lars

The days when static websites was favoured by SE's, as opposed to dynamic, are numbered in my opinion. With tools such as mod_rewrite you can have just as Search Engine friendly URLs with dynamically powered sites as you can with a static site. That's pretty much the only why it would be favourable with static sites, because the URLs for dynamic sites were often index.php?something=something, which SE's had a harder time indexing than the traditional URLs.

As for how to increase your PR - Nobody really knows exactly which factors and how much they influence your PR except for Google, but it has become commonly accepted that the main way to increase your own PR is to get good in-bound links from higher PR sites.

__________________
Current Projects
[ Lars-Christian dot com ] [ Web Developers Forum ] [ WebDev Blog ]

Archaic Sage

I read that it was simple algorithm that created their page ranking. And because google update their engine once a month (I think) that's why the page rank goes all over the place, because of the google dance.

With the mod_rewrite, I've never used that. I will look into that one, thanks.

Lars

Nobody except Google knows what algorithm(s) that are used to determine the Search Engine Positions, and I am almost certain the same goes for PageRank. As for the updates, it seems to be updated about every three months or so, which means we could be looking at an update around the turn of the month, which is just a few days away.

And yeah, mod_rewrite hack is definately work looking into. Most of the pre-built Content Management Systems support it these days.

__________________
Current Projects
[ Lars-Christian dot com ] [ Web Developers Forum ] [ WebDev Blog ]