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Backlinks are great for SEO but only if they’re legitimate

August 26, 2019 by Peter Mahoney

All off-site SEO basically comes down to is creating backlinks.

Directory listings, local citations, they’re all much the same when it comes to it.

Backlinks help if they’re legitimate – which means someone likes your site and has a proper reason to link to it. Any attempt to manipulate your own link profile goes against Google’s guidelines – and they’re adept at catching people and penalising them for it.

I’ve blogged about this a number of times – you can read some of those if you’d like more information.

My approach to SEO is entirely Google friendly; I very much believe the best approach is to match the search engines’ approach and fulfill their guidelines and recommendations.

This is sort of a catch-22, because while you shouldn’t fake links you do want them. My usual advice is to make use of your real life contacts to get some – ask suppliers or related sites to link to you, that sort of thing.

I should add too when people DO get links without properly asking people they really know for them – they tend to get extremely low quality ones. Too many low quality links hurts rather than helps. For example, every single person I’ve ever seen selling a BBC, Apple or Huffington Post link are actually just creating user profiles on those systems and sticking URLs in the bio section of those profiles.

That’s not really a proper link on the BBC! People think they’re going to get something in a news article, but more often than not they’re on pages Google doesn’t even index. The effect is people buy a back link on a ‘high quality domain’ but don’t get any SEO authority for it at all.

The people selling these links aren’t even doing it manually. There are automated tools they use to create hundreds of links in a few minutes. Google is smarter than this.

Because Google says explicitly that trying to manipulate your own link profile is against their terms there is no such thing as paying for Google safe links. It’s an oxymoron.

How good am I?

November 30, 2015 by Peter Mahoney

I’m not very good at tooting my own horn, but for the record, there are over 1,000 reviews of my service floating around on the internet, an 998 of those are 5-star feedbacks.

I’ve been doing website development since 1995, and SEO since 1998. Even according to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule, that makes me an expert in both areas a few times over.

I just had a moment this morning that reminded myself just how experienced I am what I do. One client signed up for my monthly SEO service a few weeks ago. Normally it’s a month before I issue the first update but I do like to keep an eye on how things are going and check the data fairly regularly.

So when he wrote to ask how things were progressing I was very happy to be able to send him this graph, showing the number of times his site was seen in Google search results over the past 90 days, with a crudely drawn arrow indicating when he started working with me.

So how good am I? Very good. I’m just not always very good at telling you about it.

SEO, in a nutshell

March 26, 2013 by Peter Mahoney

At its core, SEO is about reinforcing. Reinforcing your messages, your values, who you are and what you do.

Each page, every blog post, should help strengthen those key messages.

When we stop thinking about SEO in terms of its technical aspects, and instead see it as a form of communicating and interacting, it becomes both easier to understand, and perhaps more importantly we can start to slot it in with the rest of our business plans.

Almost everything we do in every aspect of our lives (including work!) is about the interplay between people. If we can find a way to see more of the processes we invest our energy and time in in those terms, then a cohesive model starts to emerge.