Is link building in any form worth while, or is it a waste of time? Do links benefit your web site and push you up the results, or is it all one big myth? Have a look at my experiment results!

I have of late been carrying out a few experiments with link building to see what the effects are. I am part way through the entire test, which aims to find out if too many links can equally destroy the good work. But I am noticing several interesting results.

For my test I picked on a new site of my own that included a claim phrase from a paid to post system. This claim phrase is a random group of words that is just found on web-sites trying to become members of the system, so it is very unlikely that anyone else on the internet is running any SEO on it.

My blog, at the outset of the experiment, was 35th in the Google search results for this claim phrase and nowhere to be found on Bing or Yahoo. I used the phrase as the anchor text for a link to the post page from a PR3 site that I also control.

Give it a week and Google has been all more than the PR3 website. Funnily, this site is suddenly 12th on the results. At first, the blog moved up from 35th to 15th and then 10th, finally stepping above my PR3 site.

So through a single link on a PR3 page, my site jumped 2 full pages for this totally uncontested phrase on Google. It hadn’t moved a single place until the day I saw that the PR3 website had been revisited by Google. So, the merely explanation for the jump of 25 positions is this new found link to it.

But, it is also interesting to note Bing and Yahoo. Neither had the post page listed in the search results prior to the link going live. Yahoo did quite quickly collection the PR3 site with the collection on it for the search terms, which was quite promising, but it took a few more days until it also listed the post, down on the bottom of page 4.

The interesting difference between Google, Bing and Yahoo is the number of results each return. Bing and Yahoo return 30 – 40 results on this search yet exactly the same search on Google returns almost 800 existing results.

It appears that Google is being less fussy about what pages it caches and lists in the search engines. And when looking at how numerous pages of the website that Yahoo has indexed, they are nigh on all category and archive pages. There is only one post page listed in the archives – the one in this testing.

So, it looks as although because of one PR3 page pointing to the post, Google has promoted the website from 35th to 10th and Yahoo has taken an interest in the page and also cached it and listed it well. Bing though, is only being slow (it hasn’t visited the PR3 page for a few time).

Therefore, inbound links are beyond doubt the lifeblood of a web site. They do move you up the results and make search engines take notice of the pages. Next, I’ll test whether a web site wide link destroys the position or aids it!

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