There has been some ongoing discussion about whether or not Google should penalise sites with a large amount of footer links. Footer links are something that we have all come across while surfing the net, and in a link-building environment, web pages are easier to surf using footer links.

In a post I read from Seroundtable, it is said that the footer links wont actually be penalised if your links are relevant and kept under a certain limit. I fully agree with this. If you have over 100 links with all different anchor text, Google might crawl your site and lose what the true content in your site covers. Whereas if your footer links are all relevant, and there are not a lot of them, it might work to your advantage. Relevance to the content would be the key to remember when creating footer links.

Matt Cutts has said that Google considers buying text links for PageRank purposes to be outside their quality guidelines and wants to eradicate all unnatural linking.

Sites that publicly sell links have been penalised by Google on Search engine results pages and on PageRank passing ability.

Nearly all major search engines use links as editorial votes given by choice to the website. If sites buy links to increase their standing on search engine results pages, websites that naturally attract links to rank are at a disadvantage.

It seems evident that Google is getting better at detecting paid links and penalising sites that publicly sell them.

This is great news for Webmasters and users alike because once paid links are removed from the equation, Google can assign trust based on links gained over the past year with much more confidence than before. This results in higher quality with more relevant search results.

PageRank is the online currency, although not the only one, because there are still other search giants that don`t trade in PageRank. However, many webmasters and marketers vest much of their interests in that little green Rank-o-meter in the browser toolbar we all know so well.

Trends, it cannot be ignored, are there to be followed. It was once the place of every marketer to squeeze relevantly selected keywords into all the right slots, and that would be it. No cutting edge marketing campaigning needed – simply juicing the Meta elements would be enough get somewhere in the search engine results. Now it is different. Some years after the turn of the millennium, the goal posts have shifted so far back that your full efforts are usually not enough to rank a highly competitive page.

It is always somewhat stressful to undertake a link building campaign for any given client, in that one needs approach each situation or industry from a completely fresh and unique angle, there is certainly an art to it. It`s not that one needs vast libraries of esoteric knowledge to attain the “perfect” web partnership (which wouldn`t hurt mind you), but rather that online business capitalism is nothing new and the getting a relatively small brand to rank (or a strong offline brand even) normally requires a good solid quantity of work hours. Constantly furthering the web presence of a site over an extended period is what it takes to climb the SERP ladder, as is true in the physical world as well. Get-rich-quick mentality does not apply to organic search engine optimization.

PageRank (PR) is the method used by Google to rank web pages. This method “independently” weighs links to your site`s pages from other pages on the internet. If you have the Google Tool Bar you can access PR.

This is the heart of Goggles software, it is a system developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google. PageRank plays a central role in many of Goggle`s web search tools.

In their Stanford University paper; The Anatomy of a Search Engine, Sergey and Larry speak about how academic citation literature has been applied to the web. By counting citations or backlinks to a given page, it gives some approximation of a page’s importance or quality. PageRank extends this idea by not counting links from all pages equally but by the number of links on a page.

Anchor text is the wording used to represent an active link visually on a web page. This is something that should never be overlooked at webmasters, because neglecting it can land the sub-pages of your website in the supplemental results (less important pages) of search engines.

Search engines crawl the web constantly, following links to find and index information within web pages to later provide relevant resources for peoples many various searches. They Index pages that contain text related to topics, and due to the massive amount needed to be processed in a very short space of time, a link may not be considered should it contain no anchor text.

In other words, search engines give weight to the text that is attached to a link and follow that link if the text denotes something relevant to a query. The text ‘points` relevance at the page it is referencing, and the search engines continued interest is based on that text.

If you ever browse through the online forums of WMW or even WPW, in the Link section you will always see countless questions on the value of recips, how many inbound links do i need, what links should i look for, are authority links better than 1000′s of normal links, etc…. the list is endless. The worst part, if that these questions are continually posted, with repeats.

So what is needed more? An authority link? a few? or 1000′s of normal links, whether it be reciprocals or 1 ways… Well, we have have over 50 clients in almost each industry, so link building is slightly different each time, with it’s own unique hurdles. But the common factor to get clients where they need to be in SERPS when it comes to link building, is a combination of links.