You have perhaps been told that getting links from other sites related to your own website genre is generally a good idea. Perhaps you have even gotten not a few email requests to this effect.

Most of us search engine optimization professionals know what this phrase means, but for the less geeky it simply means getting links from other sites to your own.

When this whole thing started, this was done by exchanging links between sites, and this was acceptable for a while but the search engines soon began to devalue these reciprocal efforts because Tom would call Harry, Bella, Davis and Susan to ask them to link to his site and Google particularly thought that this activity was simply contrived and not natural.

Spam is known to many of us as that tasty meat from which the current swine flu propagates,lol, sorry couldn’t help myself, but in internet lingo it is also known as the junk email that attempts to get commercial gain.

I.e. too many enterprising spammers send out unsolicited blog comments to thousands of open blogs in an attempt to gain back links. Others created fake websites and pages with links back to their own – not the phrase “their own” – commercial products – hence the need for objective PageRank and PageTrust. In those early days, the search engines were not looking at some of these things such as which reciprocal links were owned by the same person or which 5 linking websites were on the same machine. In order to thwart the spammer type group, this information is considered carefully used by the search engines as it is rather important for determining exactly who the spammers are.

Perhaps one of the most important aspects to the backlinking process is in what keywords one uses – traditionally, this has been where most linking efforts have fallen down.

Why? We can’t specifically tell others to use such and such an anchor text in their link to us. And in direct contradiction to what you might be reading around the net, therein lies a big part of the problem, right?

Secondly, since as a casual reader, one is not likely to be an expert on niche market keywords, you are going to most logically try to pick the keywords having the most traffic. Is this a mistake? A very new online venture, even after being indexed by MSN or most search engines, doesn’t stand a prayer for getting traffic based on the most highly trafficked keywords – sorry but this wait for traffic could extend to many months or even years.

So, possibly a waste of time, right?

But there is yet one more major problem. Initially a new html or htm page has a Google Rank of N/A. Then after its indexed, typically 0 where 0 is not good and 10 is the best. Some may say differently while a new page with N/A or O as its rank will have a freshness quotient that can help it positively, in most search engines, its zero which is evidence of lack of credibility will assuredly work negatively against it.

Exceptions abound however and if the newly created page is sitting on a highly popular Web 2.0 social network property like squidoo or craigslist, bebo or scribd to name a few then it won’t be penalized as much just because its current pagerank or credibility level appears to be a zero.

As the examples of exceptions above clearly show, it is thought that new pages on foundation sites such as those with a credibility level of 5 or above, inherently acquire some of the PageRank or PageTrust of the site that they rest on.

All sounds rather complicated huh? What can a novice do ?

Google’s time worn advice, go back to basics, content and get creative. They would recommend strongly that we even create “link-bait” that will cause others to want to link to you.And that’s inherently a great idea if you have any idea what this link-bait thing means. Ignoring Google’s advice is always done at your own peril, however I urge you to examine the issues involved in creating link-bait more deeply. Calculate whether you really have the 6-18 months that it takes to consistently create new articles on a daily basis, and to put out such a ferocious amount of high grade material in one spot that would cause people to consistently put a link to that page from their own – If the answer is yes, then you now know the true meaning of link-bait.

There has got to be a better way no?