Warren Buffett, the famed investor behind Berkshire Hathaway, boiled investing advice down to just two rules:
Rule #1: Don’t lose money.
Rule #2: Don’t forget Rule #1.
Internet marketing can be boiled down to two rules as well:
Rule #1: Thou shalt get backlinks.
Rule #2: Don’t forget Rule #1.
When I first started blogging in May 2007, I didn’t have a clue about the value or importance of backlinks. I can remember submitting articles on my blog to carnivals, only to be disappointed that so few visitors actually clicked through to my site. I’m embarrassed to say, but I even remember being on pins and needles about whether the carnival host would pick my article as an editor’s pick, which always seemed to increase traffic. What I didn’t realize then was (1) the value of a carnival link is the backlink, not direct traffic; and (2) click-thrus from the carnival almost never result in conversions.
What’s a backlink? For those just starting out, a backlink is simply a link from another website to your site. The link can be to your home page or any other page on your site. And while not generally called a backlink, you should consider any links on your site to another page of your site a backlink, too. If you are perplexed about the value of linking from one part of your site to another, you should read my previous article, Do You Understand the Ranking Power of Home Page Links?
A backlink is in effect a vote cast by one page in favor of another. And who counts these votes? Assuming the pages are indexed, Google counts these votes (so do other search engines, too). And Google looks at several things when tallying these votes: (1) the source of the backlink; (2) the page the backlink is pointing to; (3) the anchor text in the backlink (the anchor text is the highlighted words you click on); (4) the text around the backlink; (5) and probably 10,000 other things nobody knows about.
So today we are going to let Warren Buffett teach us some things about backlinks. And to do that, we need to play a game of pretend. Let’s pretend that Warren Buffett has just said that I am a great investor (please, no laughing). To put this in terms of backlinks, we could pretend that the Berkshire Hathaway website linked to my personal finance blog with the anchor text of “great investor.” Let’s also pretend that my mom agrees with Mr. Buffett that indeed, her son, is a great investor. What can we learn from this?
Lesson 1: Not all backlinks are created equal.
The source of the backlink matters. When it comes to investing, Warren Buffett is universally regarded as an expert. His opinions count. In the language of the Internet, Warren Buffett has a page rank of 10. My mom, on the other hand, has a page rank of 0 or 1 (sorry, mom). If Buffett told the world I was a great investor, reporters would be beating down my door for an interview. In contrast, I could get my mom and a thousand other friends and family to tell the world I’m a great investor, and nobody would care.
Lesson 2: Relevance matters.
Now let’s assume that Mr. Buffett told the world that I’m a great son. Since he’s not my dad (at least as far as I know), and I don’t know him personally, his opinion would not be of much value. In contrast, my mom’s opinion, however biased it may be, would be valuable. The key here is not to get hung up on page rank. Links from pages about blue widgets to other pages about blue widgets are valuable. Besides, page rank can and will change over time. In fact, as of this writing, Dough Blogger has a page rank of 4, even though it has all of two articles published (this one is #3) and fewer than 150 backlinks (although quantity really isn’t the issue, but that’s for another article).
Lesson 3: Two’s company; three’s a crowd.
Let’s assume that Warren Buffett not only named me as a great investor, but at the same time identified 499 other “great investors.” Now his vote of approval isn’t so special. It’s still nice to be included in the list, but I’m a lot less likely to get a call from a reporter. The same is true with backlinks. Every web page indexed in Google has a page rank (eventually). Each page can pass about 85% of its page rank to the pages it links to. The more links on a page, the less page rank each link gets. In effect, as more links are added to a page, each link gets devalued.
Think about that the next time you want to exchange blogroll links with a site that has 200 or more links on its home page.
Lesson 4: Variety is the spice of life.
Imagine that following Buffett’s statement that I’m a great investor, a reporter asks a follow up question: “Mr. Buffett, exactly why do you believe The Dough Roller is a great investor?” In response, Mr. Buffett simply responds, “he is a great investor.” And as more reporters ask questions, he gives the same response, “he is a great investor.” After a while, his response is going to seem really unnatural, even odd. Is that all he has to say is “great investor?”
Google likes variety, too. Getting a thousand backlinks with the anchor text, “internet marketing,” doesn’t look natural. In fact, get too many backlinks all at once with the same anchor text, and the search engines may punish the site. It just looks spammy, and often is.
I’ve seen “make money online” experts pushing services that will blast an article to 1,000s of article directories for you. This gives you 1,000s of backlinks for little work. The MMO blogger gets an affiliate commission, but what do you get? You get 1,000s of backlinks all with the same anchor text submitted to really crappy article directories. And Google gets to flag your site as suspicious. Save your money. Trust me; I learned the hard way.
Lesson 5: Money doesn’t buy happiness.
Now let’s assume that when Mr. Buffett said I was a great investor, he was speaking at a charity event. The event, moreover, was a fundraiser for his favorite charity, and I had just given his charity a $10 billion check (I like to think big). It was in response to the check that Mr. Buffett proclaimed my investing prowess. Now what do you think of his opinion? Probably not as much, and neither would Google.
In December 2007, Google began to punish sites that buy or sell text links. Now an entire book could be filled with information about buying and selling links. The fact is that many sites buy links with good success. I never have, in part because I’m convinced that I’d be the only one in the known universe to get caught if I tried (I have my mom to thank for that). And of course, there are many ways to buy links. But the point is this–buy links at your own risk.
All of this leads to the really important question–how do you get backlinks? That’s the subject of my next article.
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