Well, don’t really get why I chose the title in this way, but, I thought I would cover a little bit more around Google and the so called friendly backlinks, which, by the way, really doesn’t make sense, but here goes.

In all our SEO efforts, both here at Assertive-Media, and worldwide, we are all going for the same thing, and thats improved rankings. But what is the story on good backlinks, and why do they carry so much value. With all of the hype over the past few years surrounding links, it seems that without a good link profile, your website will sit in the deep dark depths of Google’s results for nearly all decent keywords. Ok, so you might catch a page 1 position for “Can I get a car with really bad car credit in London”, but honestly, how many people are likely to search that, and if they do, they are not likely to go past the first or second result for something so long tail.

Ok, so, onto the point, what is a Google friendly backlink? Well, theres no such thing, there are good links, and invaluable links, no bad links, just invaluable links. Good links are links that come from websites of a relevant or relative nature, so, something you would expect to see, instead of a link from an irrelevant website. Invaluable links are links that are unexpected, from resources that have absolutley nothing to do with the target links theme.

People still refer to “Bad Links” or other things with the same meaning, but do they really exist? The answer is no, simply because links are either built manually or naturally, allowing a judgemental view over bad links would mean competitors could poison one another by building poor / bad quality links in order to sabotage.

So, lets call the good links “Google Friendly Backlinks”, what we really mean is, Good quality links that are expected, and are not designed to mis-lead visitors.

Through the years, much speculation has surrounded all sorts of link types, from paid links to reciprocal links and so forth, the truth is, most speculate without evidence. What we had uncovered, like many other webmasters, was that good links paid their dues by helping the target website to rank better, we found poor quality links made no positive difference, thus, being invaluable.

We like to use the term Google friendly links, because this type of link is something Google would consider valuable, and, as such, would be rewarded by the odd position increase. But why would this type of link be of such benefit? Well, its simple, good quality links are best influenced naturally by having a good website, with good structure, and good content. This on its own, would drive natural link growth from other relevant sources, this combined with good on-site SEO would boost rankings significantly.

When people build links, they tend to look from the wrong perspective, simply because, the focus is around boosting rankings, which is fine. However, the long term picture should be, to generate Google friendly backlinks by giving people something good anyway. Writing a top cooking recipie, or giving good advice on a new car purchase, would be a great start, because the source offers valuable information that other webmasters are more likely to link to naturally.

This path is vital for a good SEO campaign, simply because Google can understand the relative connection of inbound links on a website, to its content base. A cookery website with hundreds of backlinks from Car websites, finance websites and other websites, doesn’t tell Google that the website is more relevant to cooking, so, as such, the generated links, along with the time and money spent are really not of any value.

But, on the other side, a cookery website with thousands of relative links from food websites, cooking equipment websites and so forth, gives Google the perception that the cookery website is actually something useful to visitors. Its this very simple, yet overlooked concept that webmasters and SEO agencies fail to recognise. After a big spend, and a long term investment in link development, you could find your budget wearing thin, with little to show for your money, other then a crowded index of invaluable links.

Why not push the boat out, dedicate some weekly time to blog, write valuable content rich and advice rich articles that make sense, and are of benefit to your target market.

You will find that the natural link growth takes a while to get kick started, but in the long run, it pays off. Stop wasting time with those hundreds of search directories, and irrelevant links, and focus your link building campaign on generating good “link bait” for those all important natural backlinks, or, Google friendly backlinks as we like to call them.

So why doesn’t Google show me all the backlinks that my website has?

Well, simply because it would create mass influence for webmasters to approach eachothers links, thus creating a larger possibility of poor search results. Google does everything in its power to reduce public release of information that could jeopardise the quality of its search results. Webmasters using webmaster tools however, can see further into a websites backlink profile.

Why does Google return poor quality links when I do a link command search?

This is a tricky one, but in the most simple explanation, Google does not release all link sources, instead, this process is made more difficult to encourage genuine webmasters to generate links using website media and content, rather then manual link development.

Why do my newly built links take so long to be recognised by Google?

Simply because of the volume of websites in Google’s index. Every few months, a large update rolls through the Google datacentres, repopulating link volumes and quality, this is commonly referred too as a PR Update.