Backlink Spreading (or Drip Feeding) Explained
Creating backlinks to your site is the primary way of getting it to rank well in Google and other search engines. The more links you create and the better targeted and more authoritative those links are, the better the site will rank. But of course, it’s not quite that simplistic and several factors affect the value of a particular backlink.
Over time Google has highly refined its ranking algorithm and these days it is no longer a case of simply throwing as many backlinks as possible to the target page. In other articles I will discuss many of the factors that affect the quality of the link itself, but in this article I want to focus on the frequency and pattern in which backlinks come into your site and introduce a technique known as link-spreading, or drip-feeding.
Google has a spider that is constantly running and crawling websites looking for new backlinks. It looks at each individual link but it is also monitoring the frequency and source of those links to establish any patterns. Google prefers links that it deems are natural. What is a natural link? As an example, you may have a site about cats and write a post about how to groom your Persian cat in the winter. You might start getting backlinks from bloggers in the cat niche, people might be stumbling your page, bookmarking it at a social site or tweeting it to their followers. These are ‘natural’ links.
These kinds of links look natural to Google because they are generated over a period of time in a fairly random pattern and they are located in different places. Google does not give as much credit to backlinks that look unnatural. For example, social bookmarking is one of the tools in the IMAutomator suite. An individual may have just one favourite bookmarking site but of course there are a great many and IMAutomator allows you to submit your bookmark to all of them. 50 backlinks is better than 1!
However, when creating a large number of links, we don’t want those all to be created at once because Google can see this as an unnatural linking pattern and lower the value of the links accordingly. The answer then, is to spread out those backlinks over a period of time and this is known as backlink spreading or backlink drip feeding and this is the technique that IMAutomator uses.
Are there any downsides to this strategy?
There are pro’s and con’s to just about anything! Another benefit of link building in general is to get a new page or site indexed in the search engines which of course is particularly useful if your website is new. In this situation you may want to create a bunch of backlinks quickly to get your site in the index.
Another possible downside is that you could potentially lose out on the benefit of a hot new trend. This depends very much on the subject of your article. The cat example I used earlier is something that is timeless - there will always be Persian cats that need grooming so this is an article that can sustain the test of time. However if you are writing about something new, such as an event that has just occurred in the news, then you might want more immediate attention. If there is a flurry of links coming into sites on a specific new topic, Google can see this as a hot trend and push the relevant article further up in the rankings for a while.
So how fast should you build your links? This is one of those questions that cannot be accurately answered so with IMAutomator you have the flexibility to choose a link frequency that suits you. If you want a fast submission, you can have all of the backlinks submitted in a single day, or you can spread them out over more time if you prefer. You are in control.
The IMAutomator social bookmarking tool (and new tools will operator in the same way) allows you to pick the number of days to spread your submission when you enter your bookmark into the system. That bookmark is submitted to a number of social bookmarking sites and these will always change around a little bit. Sites come and go sometimes but the database is always updated with fresh sites.