Backlink Drip Feeding Explained
Sunday, February 28th, 2010Google and other search engines used backlinks as the primary way of determining how to rank sites. The more links, better targeted they are and higher authority they carry, the better the site will rank. However, things aren’t always that simple, and there are quite a few aspects that affect how good any particular backlink is.
Over time, Google has got much better at ranking sites and their algorithm has become highly refined. These days blindly throwing a ton of backlinks to a target page is not as effective as it used to be. In other articles I’ll discuss various factors that affect link quality, but for now I’ll focus on the linking pattern and introduce a technique known as link-spreading, or drip-feeding.
Google has a spider that is constantly running and crawling websites looking for new backlinks. It looks at each individual link but it is also monitoring the frequency and source of those links to establish any patterns. Google prefers links that it deems are natural. What is a natural link? As an example, you may have a site about cats and write a post about how to groom your Persian cat in the winter. You might start getting backlinks from bloggers in the cat niche, people might be stumbling your page, bookmarking it at a social site or tweeting it to their followers. These are ‘natural’ links.
These kinds of links look natural to Google because they are generated over a period of time in a fairly random pattern and they are located in different places. Google does not give as much credit to backlinks that look unnatural. For example, social bookmarking is one of the tools in the IMAutomator suite. An individual may have just one favourite bookmarking site but of course there are a great many and IMAutomator allows you to submit your bookmark to all of them. 50 backlinks is better than 1!
However, we don’t want those 50 links to be created all at once because Google sees this and deems it to be an unnatural linking pattern and thus doesn’t give those links as much credit as usual. The solution then, is to spread those backlinks out over time and this is what we call backlink spreading or backlink drip feeding and this is the technique that IMAutomator uses.
Are there any downsides to this strategy?
There are always at least two sides to any story! Another benefit of posting backlinks to sites such as social bookmarking sites is that it is a great way to help your article get indexed in the search engines and this is particularly useful if you’re posting links to a brand new site. If you spread the links out over a long time, it may take a while for the page / site to get indexed.
Another potential downside is that if you are writing about a hot new trend, and your links come in slowly, Google may not realise that you are on top of that trend. Some topics, such as the cat example I used earlier are timeless as you’ll always have cats that need grooming, but current affairs, news, celebrity gossip etc is much more timely. Google spots these trends by looking for a flurry of links going into many sites all posting on the same topic. In this case it is actually beneficial to build some backlinks quicker so that Google sees your article as part of the trend. These tend to rank more highly for a little while.
So is there a formula to determine how many links should be created in any given period? In a word, no - it’s just not set in stone. The approach IMAutomator takes is to give you the flexibility to choose your linking frequency. If you want a quick submission, you can set it to complete in one day or you can choose to spread it out over a number of days. You are in control.
The IMAutomator social bookmarking tool (and new tools will operator in the same way) allows you to pick the number of days to spread your submission when you enter your bookmark into the system. That bookmark is submitted to a number of social bookmarking sites and these will always change around a little bit. Sites come and go sometimes but the database is always updated with fresh sites.
IMAutomator is a free tool that automates the task of link building to your website. It contains a social bookmarking tool which submits your bookmarks to many sites in a completely automated fashion. Create your free IMAutomator account now!
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