Notes on Inbound Link Text

by Steven Leung

Realtor, Internet Entrepreneur

Author website

I broke my blog a few weeks ago and it proved something pretty interesting about Google.  The lesson behind that experience can help you bring in higher quality visitors from search engines.

Fixing my mistake was simple since I’d just put a semicolon where it didn’t belong, and while the error was ugly, my site was back to normal in about a minute.

But sometimes coincidences happen, and while my site was belly up talking about some PHP parse error, Google’s friendly spiderbot came crawling by to pick up its latest snapshot of my site.  Oops!

So, normally, a search for “silicon valley real estate” shows my entry like this:

And, for the next day or so, it would look like this:

After reading the ugly description text, I put my eyes back in their sockets and thought about the title text.  I never use the phrase “steve leung silicon valley” on my site and my title tag at the moment was something like “Unexpected Error”.  But I knew, like the Erics have mentioned on BHB before, that Google gives a lot of weight to what people link to you say.

It takes those links so seriously, that it will literally use their text in its own search results if your site loses the plot for some reason.  Which shows how important other people’s links to you are.

How do I know people used that phrase to link to my site?  In this case, Google Webmaster Tools.  You won’t use it everyday, but it’s indispensable for a few reasons.  The most important is that it gives you insight into the great undocumented void of how Google sees your site, and if you have any technical issues that will prevent you from getting indexed correctly in their search engine.

In fact, Google Webmaster Tools has evolved to a point where it will flag issues that aren’t purely technical, like repeated titles.  This happens a lot with WordPress blogs which use the same title any time there’s pagination.

It also gives you the ability to communicate with Google if you really need to.  I once bought a domain name from someone who’d used it as a spam site.  It wasn’t showing up in the Google index in spite of a new owner and fresh content, but a quick reconsideration request sent through Google Webmaster Tools had the site restored in about two days.

It’s also useful if your webmaster or SEO used a black hat optimization technique which resulted in a penalty, and you’d like to make amends.  And, in many cases, Google will also send you a notification that there’s evidence your site shows signs it’s been hacked.

But for folks looking to build higher-value traffic to their sites, understanding how people link to you is the first step to building a keyword set that will bring in higher quality traffic.  So why the emphasis on Google?  Almost 70% of market share in the U.S. (and if this is any indication of which way the wind is blowing… almost 90% in the UK.)