What is Link Diversity and Why is it Important?

News Flash: Links pointing to your website is good for your rankings!

Now that we got that obvious bit of news out of the way, let me give you some insight to what I've seen google doing lately. For many years, a link was a link. That changed sometime around 2007. No longer are all links created equal. More important, not all types of links are created equal.

If you can get 50,000 spam comment links, do you think those links are just as valuable as 50,000 links from bloggers writing about your website? Absolutely not! There are three reasons why spam comment links aren't as valuable.

1. Plenty O' Spam

I firmly believe that Google has the resources to find spam links and devalue them. Notice that I didn't say "penalize". That is the most common misconception in the SEO community. You won't be penalized for spamming, but your links can be rendered useless by Google's algorithms. Spamming millions of links is easy to find, the reason is because everyone is using the same software and the same search terms (operators like "powered by wordpress" inurl:2011/03 make it easy to find blogs to spam to). If you think it's easy for you to find and spam these sites, how easy do you think it is for Google to find these same sites with 200 spam comments and devalue all outgoing links on the page?

2. Unique footprints

When bloggers (and other non-spam) websites link to you, many are using different scripts to run their websites. You've got hundreds of different content management systems (CMS) that each have a unique footprint. On top of that, most CMS's have themes that can change a footprint even further, or remove it completely. Many sites such as Ezilon are developed from scratch and don't contain any traceable footprints, links from sites without footprints are always ideal!

3. Link diversity

When you use software to spam links, you're getting links from one type of site, whether it's vBulletin, Wordpress, PHPbb, or whatever the latest software spam tool is spamming. With this type of link building your links are extremely easy to find and devalue, they're all coming from the same type of site! If every single one of your links comes from a url with member.php?u=82840, you're spamming vBulletin, plain and simple. Without any type of link diversity, you're links are easy to find and devalue.

What Can You Do?

If you find yourself never breaking the top 10, or getting stuck in the middle of the first page try these few simple fixes to boost your ranking even further.

1. Create Some Diversity

Create links on websites that you're not normally creating links on. Talk to your friends with blogs, network with other bloggers who write about similar but not competitive industries. Twitter is a great place for making contact with other bloggers and eventually trading posts or just asking if they would take a look at your site.

2. Nobody Needs More Spam

Spamming links to your main site isn't going to help boost your rankings. There are millions of the exact same type of link being created each day. It's easy to recognize and devalue, and I guarantee that Google already has algorithms in place to find and devalue your spam links.

3. Hire an Ethical Link Builder

Before hiring a link building, ask what types of links they build. Do they just spam links and hope it helps? Do they have their own websites to test their link building strategies, have they been link building for 8 weeks or 8 years? If they've been around for a long time, it's likely they've learned to adapt to what works.

TL;DR - Build links from multiple types of sites for maximum effectiveness.

Brandon Hopkins is a freelance link builder and recently started a link building service that focuses on building a diverse link profile each and every month.