You may have heard the expression, “sometimes less is more”, well as it turns out when it comes down to getting top ranking in Google you can’t ignore the fact that the top sites’ inbound linking strategy is based on this exact principle. A few older and more relevant inbound links will have a greater affect on your search engine ranking than even hundreds of relatively new links.
In my previous article, How Do You Build Links For Google, Yahoo And MSN At The Same Time I have discussed he differences in the external ranking factors used by the three major search engines and how they can influence your website’s ranking. It’s a well known fact that Google favors older websites with high quality related links from trusted sources in their ranking results. The more competitive the keyword terms are, the more older the websites you will find at the top of the search results.
Take for example the keyword term “car insurance”, with over 40 million competing pages in the Google search results. It’s easily one of the toughest keywords terms to get top rankings for.
For a quick illustration I have extracted the top 10 websites found on Google using the search term “car insurance” and used the Archive.org information to estimate the websites’ age. It’s not surprising to see that most of the domains are over 5 years old for this very competitive search terms.
Info Provided by Domain Age Tool of Webconf.com SEO Toolset
1 |
geico.com |
9 years 1 months old |
2 |
churchill.com |
8 years 5 months old |
3 |
progressive.com |
8 years 5 months old |
4 |
confused.com |
7 years 4 months old |
5 |
carinsurance.com |
9 years 0 months old |
6 |
admiral.com |
8 years 2 months old |
7 |
directline.com |
7 years 6 months old |
8 |
esure.com |
6 years 1 months old |
9 |
elephant.co.uk |
6 years 3 months old |
10 |
budgetinsurance.com |
5 years 8 months old |
If you had some false illusions about getting a new website to the top of the Google search results probably should have been crushed by now. Getting top results in Google in a year or less, targeting very competitive terms is just not going to happen.
But don’t despair, there is actually hope for newer websites to do very well in Google for less competitive search terms and long tail searches. Take a look at this list of top 10 websites below for the search term “designer sunglasses” with less than 1.8 million pages competing. Still a fairly hefty competition, but we do see some domains that are just over 2 years old in the top positions.
| 1 |
sunglassesportal.com |
4 years 0 months old |
2 |
topsellingsunglasses.com |
3 years 0 months old |
3 |
allaboutvision.com |
6 years 2 months old |
4 |
importer.alibaba.com |
2 years 1 months old |
5 |
eyeglasses.com |
6 years 3 months old |
6 |
unitedshades.com |
3 years 1 months old |
7 |
framesdirect.com |
7 years 6 months old |
8 |
thesunglassmanonline.com |
4 years 10 months old |
9 |
designersunglasses.net |
6 years 7 months old |
10 |
vision3k.com |
5 years 10 months old |
Link aging matters so start building your link popularity early
So what makes some of these “relatively new” websites do so well in the SERPs on Google? Domain age of course is just one of the factors, but as evidenced by the two sample SERPs it can make a big difference. The other major off-page factor is the number of well established inbound links from relevant websites. Well, what exactly well established links mean in search engine optimization terms?
It simply means that a link has been pointing to a specific domain for a long period of time and therefore has a higher link value than a link that is only a few days old. Providing both websites are equally related to the target website, a well “aged inbound link” can deliver more link popularity juice than a fresh inbound link.
This is the reason why there is delay of at least a few months before new inbound links starting to have the desired affect and translate into a ranking increase in the Google SERPs. Google weighs link aging in their ranking algorithm much more heavily than Yahoo or MSN to fight link spam and link buying.
Google tries to fight link spam on two fronts at the same time. Firstly Google targets link buyers. Link buying can get very expensive when link aging is taken into consideration. Paying huge monthly fees for dozens of small text links over a period of 6-8 months can get prohibitively expensive and may not even produce the desired results. This is becoming a major deterrent to link buying.
Secondly blog comment based link spamming is an epidemic which has been only partially solved by the rel="nofollow" tag in blog comment links. This is where link aging comes into play, a new inbound link will be only “trusted” once it passes a Google specified age threshold.
Here are some link building ideas to start with
Start your link building as soon as your website goes live, don’t wait months to start your link popularity building. Follow these proven link popularity building steps.
- If your website has a local focus find related local businesses and board of trade organizations to link to you
- Get links from trade associations, governments and educational organization
- Get links from charities and non-profit organizations
- Submit to the top general directories
- Submit to niche directories in your market segment
- Write articles on your website’s subject and submit them to the article submission directories
