The importance of link diversity
Some time ago I spoke about the importance of the diversity of traffic; that’s the importance of making sure all your traffic isn’t coming from one place. This was in the wake of the Content Farm update, which later changed the name Panda Update to the affectionate nickname given to the Google programmer by co-workers, who spearheaded and played a pivotal role in the update in question.
The idea was that no source of traffic is guaranteed and trusted forever, be it paid traffic, organic SEO, etc. because a substantial change in the policies of that traffic source and its ocean of traffic has stopped to resemble a stream that drips overnight, unless there are many other sources of traffic coming in.
Today I’m going to talk about something completely different: the importance of link diversity.
Traffic and SEO are inextricably linked, but this will mostly refer to search engine optimization and the primary role that link diversity plays in it.
Just like you don’t want all of your traffic to come from the same place, you don’t want all of your links to come from the same place.
Would you rather have just one VERY excited webmaster vouch for your site OR would you rather have a whole caravan of webmasters endorse it?
The answer is pretty clear, variety wins over and over again. Google doesn’t want to see a single site or type of site linking to their site because that tells them that their content is not good enough to get links from other sources and looks questionable at best.
Just like if you were shopping and interested in buying a new product, you would rather read a lot of testimonials from different people about that product rather than just one very excited person who is probably just an accomplice to that company; eventually you will want to hear from other people to get more opinions.
The moral of the story is to make sure that you not only get links from a variety of article directories, but from other types of sites such as blogs, bookmarks, RSS, forums. Diversity is the cornerstone of any successful engagement campaign because it seems natural and it seems like you have valuable content to share with the world. Therefore, you should think about varying your linking opportunities as often as possible to enjoy the benefits of Google.
