Glossary of terms relevant to backlinking
IM
Short for Internet Marketing.
Backlink
A backlink is a hyperlink or linked word/phrase on another site (not yours usually) on the Web pointing to one of your site pages or articles. Unlike Yahoo and Bing, Google places a great deal of emphasis on backlinks as a measure of trust and authority.
Outsourcing
When routine Internet Marketing jobs such as creating Web 2.0 accounts, building backlinks, writing articles or other jobs (depending on your particular IM model) are carried out by freelancers, usually living in other parts of the world where labor costs are lower. The main means of outsourcing are through websites like elance.com, odesk.com and guru.com.
Double-pass backlinking
The process of setting up backlinks in two stages or ‘passes’ on other sites. The first ‘pass’ is to create the account with genuine-looking biographical details and photo, the second pass is to drop the links in. A week is a good general timeframe to allow between your first and second pass and this gives the backlinks a considerably better chance of not being deleted as the account will look more genuine. The newest memberships on community sites (like forums) are often the most scrutinised and least trusted.
Single-pass backlinking
Creating a new account and leaving the backlinks in one step. As new accounts are more likely to be scrutinised by moderators/webmasters, this can be riskier if a new member on a forum about Facebook Application Development has backlinks to, for example, acne, weight loss, forex and debt reduction sites.
Nofollow
nofollow is a form of HTML coding used to instruct Google that a hyperlink on a page should NOT influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to combat spam. Using a tool like SEO for Firefox from here:
Dofollow
The opposite of nofollow. Without a nofollow HTML tag, a link will pass ‘Link Juice’ to the hyperlinked site.
Link Juice
The power of trust and authority (and therefore Google Organic Search results significance) coming from one site or page to another via a link (kind of like ‘electricity’).
Link velocity
The speed at which links are built to a particular page. I know of some very well resourced companies who build literally millions of backlinks a year to a single page to compete in VERY competitive niches. Our monthly members are building backlinks at a Link Velocity of 400 a month. Consistency is the key rather than velocity as truly viral articles across the Web can attract big numbers of links.
OBL
Outbound links. This refers to the number of backlinks on a single page of a site. In theory, the more outbound links (links to OTHER sites) a page has, the less Link Juice will pass to each link as the PR power is shared between them. However, I’m very doubtful about this and will be presenting my counter-argument soon on this forum.
Crawled/Spidered
When Google becomes aware of new material on the Web by visiting a particular page or site (from a link elsewhere), this is called getting spidered or crawled. However, what you really want is for Google to regard that new material as worthy of being added to their overall index. Getting something crawled or spidered is pretty easy – getting indexed can take a little longer and often occurs on a somewhat unpredictable timeframe e.g. I’ve had sites or articles that took a month to get indexed whereas others have been added in a day.
Indexed
The Google Index is kind of a giant virtual library of the entire Web – sort of. When new material appears on the Web, Google figures out how quickly it should be added to its Index. Some new material probably never gets indexed at all – ever. Why? Simply because the incoming links to that new material (if there are any) are not regarded as of sufficient trust or authority to justify that new site/article/page being added to the index.