Now, I know that many websites that have been around for awhile tend to have more backlinks than others. This is especially true if your site covers a very popular topic. But where most webmasters make the fatal mistake as far as rankings are concerned is in the arena of manging those backlinks. Managing backlinks isn’t as involved as many people think. In fact, often times, it can be done as fast as it takes to make a cup of coffee in the morning.
Let me explain in greater detail. In an earlier post, I mentioned that a backlink is considered a vote for you in the grand search engine poll. So, in the opinions of many people, the more backlinks that you have directed to your website, the better your rankings. And for most websites that is true. But there is a way that those backlinks can hurt your rankings. So, by our definition, managing your backlinks is, in fact, the act of monitoring the sites that link to you to make sure they don’t develop negative rankings.
There is a simple and easy way to do this. If you use a program called SEOElite (and you can download it at www.seoelite.com), you have the option of viewing the information for all the sites that link to you. Included in that information is the Google PageRank of those sites and SEOElite can get this information for you in an organized manner quickly. Although I believe that Google isn’t everything that you should look at when it comes to seo, they are one of the best. Google has a very powerful algorithm that is changed constantly and is updated to include new things. Google is also the standard by which most websites are measured. So the PageRank of a site is very important when it comes to monitoring those backlinks.
What you need to do is to compare the PageRank of your site to theirs. You most assuredly want the PageRank to be equal or for theirs to be slightly higher than yours. If yours is higher, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is something to monitor. I say this because having a lot of backlinks where the site is significantly lower can hurt your rankings. So be very careful about sites that are of low PageRank (2 or lower).
Next, I suggest that you put this information into an Excel spreadsheet where you can continuously monitor the progress of those backlinks (especially if you have fewer backlinks). If a site has a trend of repeatedly low PageRank or is lowered over time, you might consider contacting that site to have your link removed.
Developing your backlinks is easy, managing your backlinks is more difficult, but with a little bit of work, you can be successful.
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