If we were to recommend one strategy to get a website to appear in Google what would it be? We are asked this question all the time, and whilst it is difficult to be limited to just one strategy (as Google looks at many different factors), our response is always the same: concentrate on getting one-way authority backlinks that are relevant to your market.

Then there are people that say they have built up 1,000 backlinks to their site but they still aren’t showing up on Google for the keyword they want. This can be frustrating, but the reason for this will be one of the below:

Your links are mostly reciprocal. If you have met up with a thousand of your friends and said to them “if you link to my site, I’ll link back to your site”. Google can detect these links very easily and so won’t pay much attention to them.

Your links are only coming from 3 or 4 different sites. Google wants to see links from a variety of different sites.

Most of your links are going straight to your homepage. You want to do some deep linking to some of your internal pages.

All your links are from websites with a low page rank. If all your links are from pages with no page rank then your page rank will not increase as a result. A high pagerank gives you a better change to rank well on Google.

All your links are from websites with a high page rank. If all your links are from sites with a pagerank of 6 and above then Google will get suspicious and think that you may be buying these links – as it does not look natural. Your links need to be from sites with a pagerank between zero and ten (if you can even find a site that has a pagerank of ten).

All your links are from irrelevant websites. Google isn’t quite enforcing this rule as strictly as they could – but needless to say, they will in the future. If you have a website about dog training, and you get a one-way link from a site about computer games – it’s pretty obvious that this link is from a site that isn’t related to dog training.

All your links appear too quickly. If you have a website that is 3 years and 11 days old with 38 backilnks, but at 3 years and 12 days old it has 1,038 backlinks – Google may smell a rat.

Let us take this opportunity to dispel a common myth: “if you build your links too quickly Google will penalise your for it by de indexing your site or blacklisting your domain name”. Simply by common sense this cannot be true. If it were, you could simply eliminate all your competition by bombarding their sites with 10,000 links over a 24 hour period. Google knows this, so they would never de index or blacklist a site for receiving a huge surge in backlinks over a short period of time as this is an external factor that is not within our control – we can’t prevent someone from linking to our site.

What IS in our control is the websites we link OUT to. Google likes to see us linking out to other relevant sites as this appears natural. But before you do, check that the site you are linking to is a legitimate site with good content.

We have more than 20 different strategies we use to build quality, relevant, one-way backlinks with a good authority in Google; some can be found on this site – have a look around.