Back to future: why connection still counts

DAMNED if you do and damned if you don’t. That’s the reality today for many of us lowly grunts in the search marketing trenches, especially as far as backlinks go.

Backlinks remain the most important factor determining its Google page ranking, but the search giant is getting increasingly picky about the nature of those links. The company’s algorithms now look hard at the structure and content of the page containing a backlink and how it related to anchor text.

Google now even analyses how different types of link referrals, especially social media, coalesce around newly posted content in a bid to identify ‘natural’ referrals rather than all that pesky marketing bumpf.

‘The best way to get other sites to create high-quality, relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community,’ is the official word from Palo Alto.

Fair enough, but its hard not to feel a little aggrieved if your bread and butter depends on actual page impressions, particularly if your company sells, say, funeral cover or specialised plumbing parts. How are you supposed to create content that naturally gains popularity for something that just isn’t that sexy?

The answer is that backlinks remain the core of what Google does, and that is good for those of us in the less glamorous corners of the web.

However, it’s the quality of your connections that counts. That means your job just got a lot more like marketing used to be: it is no longer enough to have your name out there, it needs to be in the right places.

That’s good news for people who actually like what they do.

So, pick up the phone or drop by a convention. Stop in at a client on a Friday afternoon. Organise an industry event. They don’t need you now, but make sure you are top of their mental page rank when they do.

Sure, its harder work, but the web is a much more social place these days. Its the human connections that count, and search is no different.