Focusing vs. Manufacturing Link Authority

The difference between focusing link authority vs manufacturing domain authority is the crux of what differentiates a constructive and user-friendly link building campaign from “search spam.”

To understand the difference between manufacturing link authority vs. focusing link authority, let’s use an example.

Site A is a new site – with a very immature natural back-link profile. The owner of this site wants to take a shortcut to ranking well, and so purchases thousands of discount links – all pointing at his new site’s home page.

Site B is owned by an established, reputable Fortune 500 company that has hundreds of thousands of existing links pointing at the top level of its domain. Because Site B has multiple business units and/or product categories, these links seem to be extraordinarily disparate to the search engine, and the site is less visible than smaller, less known affiliate sites that concentrate on a single keyword or topic.

Site A describes perfectly many affiliate and aggregator sites; it doesn’t need a few, highly focused links – the owner is looking to manufacture the link authority of the site by buying, in bulk, endorsements to their site.  Instead, the owner should concentrate on creating a unique product or service, marketing, good public relations, or creating content on the site that will generate links.

Site B however, isn’t looking to manufacture any authority – with hundreds of thousands of links, the site could rank for whichever term they ‘optimize’ their home page.  Rather, the very size and power of the brand’s multiple business units or produce categories causes the search engines trouble, as the home page’s content doesn’t seem to be highly focused on any of them.  Site B is suffering from Bottled Domain Authority, and rather than manufacturing anything – it needs to find a way to focus that authority to the appropriate categories.  With only a few links pointing from reputable and authoritative sites directly to the category pages instead of the root of the site, the bottled domain authority is popped, allowing the authority to flow into the product or business level categories.

Next: Our Quality Guidelines