Backlinks to Websites – Bad for Business?

October 7, 2009 8:02 pm admin SEO

We live in a strange world where search engines such as Google will take into consideration the quality and number of backlinks in order to give a website prominence in the natural results.   While there is much talk about how important it is for companies to build backlinks to their websites, and it is, unfortunately, just one of those things that has to be done, let’s consider for a moment how crazy the situation is …

Let’s take two mythical companies – NoTime Ltd and Time2SEO Ltd.    Both companies sell widgets.   In the ‘real world’, where people have opinions about the quality of products and services provided, if the two companies went head-to-head, the company ‘NoTime Ltd’ would win every time.   They win because their widgets are better, their customer focus is superior, and people just generally love them.   However, they are still a small company that has no time to do anything except to focus on their core business.

On the other hand, Time2SEO Ltd provide a poor service, sub-standard products, and people don’t really like them much.  However, they either have the expertise, or money to spend on others with expertise, and the end result of that is plenty of quality backlinks to their website. 

So then Google comes along and although it will judge both websites in different ways, one of the factors it will consider will be the backlinks.  It sees minimal links into NoTime Ltd and several, seemingly quality, links into Time2SEO Ltd.  The end result:  Time2SEO Ltd getting stronger natural search engine positioning when people are searching online for a company that can supply widgets.

So, Time2SEO Ltd, as a sub-standard company, gain stronger search engine visiblity, pull in more enquiries and business, and continue to disappoint customers.  Meanwhile, NoTime Ltd have a poorer natural search engine visibility and don’t have the opportunity to provide a great service.   Let’s see the outcomes here:

1. NoTime Ltd doesn’t gain more business.
2. Time2SEO Ltd do gain more business.
3. The new clients of Time2SEO Ltd get a sub-standard level of product and service and so are disappointed.
4. In effect, search engines, through the way that they judge the popularity of websites, have contributed to client companies (of Time2SEO Ltd) becoming less efficient through finding Time2SEO Ltd in the search results (client companies buy widgets, the experience is negative, which makes the client companies less efficient than if they’d found a better supplier such as NoTime Ltd).

So what’s the answer here?  Is it for NoTime Ltd to themselves focus on getting quality backlinks to their website so that they can try and rise about Time2SEO Ltd?  No, because most companies in the real world don’t have the time or money to invest in sorting out backlinks, never mind all the other SEO stuff they need to do.   They also don’t believe that they should have to.

The answer, quite simply, is for the search engines to look at things afresh.  Allowing searchers to find companies in natural search results partially because of their backlinks strategy makes a mockery of search engines wanting to supply ‘quality’ results.  The quality is on the surface because many of those companies high in the natural search results aren’t actually the best companies to deal with – they’re just the best at raising their visibility.

It would take a brave search engine indeed to go down the route of introducing a true definition of ‘quality’ into their ranking criteria.   For there to be systems whereby the customers of companies grade the level of service or product they get, and that’s what counts as a factor in natural search engine positioning – now there’s something that would be beneficial to everyone (except the poor companies who need to up their game).   Such a system would have to incorporate ways to detect fraudulent gradings of companies of course but there are ways to achieve this.    Sadly, coming towards the end of 2009, there is still very little innovation coming out of the likes of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft (when it comes to natural search engine positioning criteria), but the opportunities are there for the player who really wants to make natural search engine results genuinely of the best quality possible.