Despite new trends and innovative tools like artificial intelligence stealing the limelight every now and then, many competitive industries continue to focus their SEO efforts primarily on building PageRank pass-through links.
The basic assumption is that accumulating more PageRank backlinks will increase ranking and increase website traffic conversion.
However, following this strategy is often dangerous due to potential Google Search violations. More importantly, it almost always distracts from much more sustainable ways to grow organic Google and Bing traffic to the website.
Since its introduction 25 years ago, PageRank has been on the minds of SEOs, and understandably so, as Google has been using PageRank for its internal calculations ever since and continues to do so.
However, it is important to understand that the PageRank value of any website or web page is elusive. It’s constantly changing every moment as Google crawls the web and new data is incorporated. Google does not share the current PageRank value with the interested public or the verified owner of the website.
For third parties, there are no way to reverse engineer the value or rebuild Google’s infrastructure and algorithms. Service providers circumvent this challenge by offering alternative ranking names and values, presumably representative of what Google uses internally.
There is no way to compare their calculations with the actual PageRank scores within Google’s index.
In addition, Google also does not use any trust or reputation values calculated by third parties. Alternative third-party rankings do not reliably assess backlink value.
Simply put, link buyers passing PageRank cannot estimate whether any particular backlink will increase a website’s visibility in Google. So focusing on building PageRank backlinks is akin to betting and hoping to hit the jackpot.
There are also other problems with an SEO strategy based on building PageRank forward links. It requires continued and growing efforts, tying ever larger budgets to create bonds.
For companies with limited resources, this means that over time, budgets go to other areas, such as infrastructure, code base, performance, content publishing, marketing or branding. As a result, the SEO signals of the most important websites often deteriorate or become inconsistent.
The fact that building backlinks that pass PageRank to manipulate rankings represents a Google Search Essentials Violation (formerly known as Google Webmaster Guidelines), which when detected can lead to a manual penalty, is another problem.
In short, an SEO strategy focused on buying PageRank backlinks can work. Still, it’s still an expensive guessing game that can ultimately lead to a dramatic loss of traffic when Google finds out.
However, there are much better SEO alternatives. How to allocate an SEO budget to get the highest ROI depends on the individual website.
Factors that play a role include:
The volume of landing pages. Unique sales proposal. performance Mark. The technical acumen of the responsible team.
There are safer SEO bets than PageRank backlink building.
Construction of traffic links
Website owners who have focused on PageRank backlinks for years can move on to build links to convert traffic.
This strategy, aptly proposed by former Google engineer and Search Engine Land contributor Fili Wiese, requires far fewer links, allows for instant ROI measurement, and most importantly, doesn’t risk any Google penalties.
Given how problematic a Google penalty can be for website operators that rely primarily on Google traffic, this last point should give serious reason for consideration.
performance
All other factors being roughly comparable, any website will grow in Google rankings for relevant queries if it performs faster than its competitors.
Google constantly focuses on the experiences of its users as part of its business model. Because users prefer faster loading websites, fast websites notoriously outperform their slower competitors in Google Search.
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Mark
Another SEO factor that is often underestimated is branding. Google shows no preference for any particular brand.
However, users tell Google if a ranking landing page is what they’ve been looking for by their click behavior. And users like to click on search results from brands they know and trust.
That’s why growing brand recognition is bound to increase CTR, an excellent way to increase ranking for competitive queries. The statistics provided by Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools in this regard are priceless.
Unique sales proposal
In Google and other search engines too, providing accuracy, unique results to user inquiries is vitally important. For this reason, demonstrating a unique selling proposition as a business and for each indexable page is key to getting a higher ranking.
Search engine algorithms and users need to understand why a website or landing page is exactly what they’ve been looking for. And why it’s superior to competing SERP alternatives. Combined with high brand recognition, a unique selling proposition is among the best SEO opportunities for continued growth.
Budget tracking
For large websites operating in fast-paced industries such as retail or travel, actively managing your crawl budget is a top SEO priority.
When the website’s revenue-generating landing pages are not crawled and re-crawled often enough, the website’s ranking suffers because users end up on outdated content landing pages.
When this happens, users tend to look for an alternative search result. Not only are potential conversion leads lost and brand perception tarnished, but it also represents a strong negative signal to Google that users are unhappy.
Website rankings are likely to suffer as poor user satisfaction signals continue and grow over time. Not only can this be avoided, but the trend can be reversed by helping search engine bots focus on desirable landing pages.
Using server logs, another often neglected SEO best practice, plays a crucial role here. And when exploited, it can be an SEO silver bullet.
Signal consistency
Search engine bots and algorithms can be easily confused. When this happens, website rankings are aligned for no obvious reason.
Inadvertently poorly implemented redirects, bad canonicals, misplaced noindex, incorrect hreflang implementation, and incorrect robots.txt directives are among the most common technical reasons why websites fail in organic search.
This is almost always due to outdated legacy solutions. Websites are growing, entities are constantly changing, so the consistency of the SEO signal should be checked and verified to avoid getting locked into competitive niches.
Signal consistency can be checked and contrasted using various SEO tracking and analysis tools. Tools like Botify, JetOctopus, Lumar, Oncrawl, Ryte, and Screaming Frog, among others, provide compelling insights into website content and technical signals.
They can be a great starting point to ensure consistent SEO signal and organic ranking growth. Better results are achieved when on-page and off-page crawl data is analyzed as part of a regular SEO audit cycle. Prudent website operators build these defensive SEO audits into their overall SEO strategy.
Focus on sustainable organic growth
The vast majority of ranking websites have few or no backlinks. Its visibility is due to other SEO signals. It’s worth noting that while PageRank is frequently cited online, it’s not useful for search engine optimization.
PageRank backlink building can coincide with increasing ranking, but cannot be correlated. At the same time, creating backlinks that exceed PageRank is a risk and may result in a manual penalty. Most importantly, however, focusing on PageRank tends to distract from the higher, measurable, and sustainable organic visibility growth opportunities in SEO.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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