Ever since web publishers worked out the theories built into the algorithms around backlinks, Google has been thoroughly suspicious of the whole idea. And so it should have been. But; we still see SEO firms out there claiming that backlinks are the foundation of SEO. The road those firms are on looks like the wrong one. If somebody comes to you talking about backlinks in the context of SEO, be certain of this: you are at the edge of a decision that will do your site serious harm. And there is no visible way back from that kind of work.
Something I Lived Through
About five years ago, so around 2010, a friend I am very fond of told me he wanted to pull customers off the internet for the company he had just opened. He said he wanted to work on it together and leave the site to me to plan. I could not turn down a friend I had known for years. Normally in that period I was not taking SEO jobs and I was turning down the offers that came in.
We started work. The keyword had real search volume and hundreds of companies dreamed of the first page for it. We took the site in hand and I optimized the pages. We added tests inside it and renewed the images. We improved the interface and added, one by one, the documents people in that sector would actually use. We tried to give people everything to do with what they were researching, and to waste not one second of any visitor’s time. The sector was not strategically wide, but we kept our range wide in how we set the SEO work up.
Success came, of course. It had nothing to do with backlinks, it had to do with good SEO. The site sat at number 2 and that position was perfectly fine. Aiming for first place was a fine thing to want, but first place asks for every condition of success to be met. Reality in the result, reality in the marketing: that is what SEO meant. I said first place needed time, and that if he waited and did not let the quality slip, it would come. I said it plainly.
Over six months his sales figures rose 400%. Everything was going well and he had taken on a lot of new staff. The phone genuinely did not stop. Things were fine on the SEO side and on the Google Ads side. But my friend really did dig his heels in over first place. He signed with an SEO firm that was doing the rounds at the time. That firm immediately went out and got backlinks. Blogs, forums, websites; links from hundreds and then thousands of pages. Before long his site was pulled out of the results.
Important: staying away from an SEO firm that talks about backlinks will give you a better outcome.
He broke off the agreement with that firm, of course. When he asked what should be done, the only thing I could say was that there was “not much of a move left to make”. The natural run of the thing had been broken and serious mistakes had been made. Sadly, an image lost in Google’s eyes is not easily won back. Links are not something to lose sleep over. Naturally we do promote the valuable content, documents, applications and plugins we add to these pages, as best we can. We do it so that people hear about them.
The whole point is hidden right there. I wanted to share this small memory about backlinks here on the Türk SEM blog. If you are thinking about SEO for your own company, get in touch. And if SEO is a long way outside your world, have a look at our article on “what SEO is”.
Tahir DİNÇ
Türk Sem
