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Backlink Theory: HTML Sitemaps, XML Sitemaps, RSS Feeds, and More

Posted by Michael Martinez on July 13, 2007 in Link Theory

Backlink Theory Basics

1. Backlinks: The Beginner’s Guide To Backlink Theory
2. Backlink Profiles: More Backlinks For Beginners
3. Backlink Theory: Building Backlinks From The Ground Up
4. Backlink Theory: Shaping Your Backlink Profile

Most people divide their links into internal links versus external links, and the general assumption in the industry is that external links probably matter more than internal links.

In fact, internal links are more important because you need internal links to guide both people and crawlers through your site to ensure that your content is found. Also, you can be reasonably certain that your internal links will be crawled and pass at least some value through your site. You have no way of knowing if any of your external links will pass value.

You should begin building your backlink profile with your internal links, but before you turn to acquiring external links you can do a few things to strengthen your internal link profile. These steps help your visitors, they work with most of the major search engines, and you can use them to increase your visibility.

Backlinks Designate Points of Entry

Every page on your Web site that includes indexable text has the potential to act as an entry point for both crawlers and visitors. Many pages will rank very well in moderately competitive queries without any external linkage and without the benefit of internal link anchor text. On-page factors decide more than 99% of all query results in Ask, Google, Live, and Yahoo!.

But you should use your backlinks to designate points of entry so that you can predict where your traffic will be, where the crawlers are most likely to appear, and thus manage the flow of PageRank through your site. You cannot preserve PageRank. You cannot trap visitors on your site. Both PageRank and visitors will move into and out of your site regardless of what you do (or in spite of what you do).

Choosing which pages serve as your points of entry is far better than allowing those points of entry to emerge through natural linkage. Internal navigation almost always guarantees that the root URL of any Web site acts as a point of entry. But many people fail to understand that some of their “least important” pages are also designated as points of entry by internal navigation: “About Us”, “Company Info”, “Contact Us”, “Terms of Service”, and “Help” pages are — after the root URL — the types of pages most frequently linked to.

Some people try to hide these pages from the search engines because they don’t understand the added value these pages give their sites. All these pages need in order to participate in successful conversion strategies are clear paths to the pages with the product and service information. Include all your points of entry in your conversion process. Don’t exclude them.

The HTML sitemap is another natural point of entry. If you design your navigation properly, every page will link back to the HTML sitemap. Your HTML sitemap not only helps confused visitors find what they are looking for quickly, it acts as a natural crawl page for search engines. Make sure that all your points of entry link to your HTML sitemap even if you don’t link to it on every page.

Ask, Google, and Yahoo! all now support XML Sitemaps. These files help sites generate crawling activity, which is a major benefit for new Web sites. You can drastically reduce your need for external links if you ping the major search engines with XML sitemaps. You don’t get the benefit of inbound link anchor text with XML sitemaps but you don’t have to wait weeks or months for the search engines to crawl your pages either.

Of course, submitting an XML sitemap doesn’t guarantee that your site will be indexed. Thin content sites run a high risk of tripping quality filters. Be sure your pages have substantial unique content before you ping the search engines. Embedded Javascript advertising and generic city-and-state templates are thin content, not substantive, quality content.

Blogs and forums have increasingly become points of entry for large content Web sites. On consumer-oriented sites where feedback is encouraged in blogs and forums the discussion pages often act as points of entry. Their navigation should help people find their way back to the primary site where the calls to action are located.

But Blogs and Forums offer another type of navigational help: they publish RSS feeds. RSS feeds can be used to ping a variety of secondary search services and the major search engines now index and crawl open RSS feeds. One unfortunate drawback of publishing RSS feeds, however, is that they can be targeted by scrapers. You may have to manage your .htaccess file closely to block scraping by spammers.

Learn to think of your XML sitemaps and RSS feeds as points of entry and as backlinks. They don’t pass PageRank or link anchor text but if those are the only reasons why you want links then you have a lot to learn about the value of links and how they help Web sites.

Influencer Backlinks and Visibility Channels

The best backlinks to have are those links that send a lot of visitors to your site. These high traffic links come from your influencers, the people who help you by sending you traffic. If they send you substantial traffic then the odds are pretty good that their sites are crawled frequently and their links may bring crawlers to your site, too.

Influencer backlinks are only special because they are found on high quality, high traffic sites. Instead of obsessing over “quality links”, “relevant links”, and other such SEO nonsense, you should strategically seek out sites capable of becoming influencers for you. They won’t always send you a lot of traffic, but experimentation will help you learn how to identify good influencer sites.

You need to cultivate a relationship with an influencer. Keep giving them special attention, unique information for their visitors, and lots of reasons to provide more links to your content. You don’t want site-wide links (unless you’re being included in an exclusive blogroll that offers only elite links). You want embedded links in news blurbs, blog posts, and admin forum posts. When an influencer site’s visitors look for links to your site you have become a valuable asset to that community.

Visibility Channels are not something you’ll see the average SEO blog and forum talk about. These are not social media sites. These are not links on DIGG, StumbleUpon, Technorati, or Bloglines. Those are Web sites, not channels. A channel, in this context, is a community of Web sites that acknowledge your value. They collectively channel visibility to a small selection of elite Web sites.

So before you start plotting to seduce visibility channels to your dark side of the Force, understand that you need to have an elite Web site. What’s an elite site? It’s a site that offers content and community value to a niche that cannot be found on other sites.

If all you’re offering is the same news headlines or blog post roundups that other people offer, you’re not elite. If you have the same products and services as other Web sites, you’re not elite. If you have to ask for links, trade for links, buy links, or otherwise entice people to link to your site, you’re not elite.

The secret to creating an elite site is to identify an interest (through query research) that a specific topic community has yet to satisfy through the Web. Then you provide that Web content. That makes you elite. But you may not remain elite for long. If other people fulfill that community need better than you then you will lose your elite status.

Elite Web sites cannot stop competing. Once you stop updating, once you stop innovating, your days as an elite site are numbered.

Being elite means other sites will link to you for the sake of completeness. They will feel compelled to do so because everyone in their community knows you do something no one else can do. They have to acknowledge the contribution you make. All the hobbyists know who you are. All the analysts know who you are. All the niche directory operators know who you are.

The more visibility channels you reach into, the broader your backlink profile becomes. The more diversified your backlink profile becomes, the more stable your linking relationship with the search engines becomes.

Some people strive to become elite resources through link baiting. If you do this, you cannot for any reason take down the link bait. You destroy the value you created if you remove the content and use 301 redirects. Your visibility channel will evaporate and leave you linkless and forgotten. You can only get away with 301 redirects if you simply move the content to a new location (but doing that is a cheap PageRank-chasing trick — it underscores a very weak understanding of search engine optimization and the power of links).

Last Word on Backlinks

This week I have devoted a lot of time to explaining how you can build and use backlinks to your advantage. But there is a great deal of ignorance in the SEO community when it comes to linking. People cannot seem to look beyond the Google Toolbar. Nor can they seem to stop obsessing over inefficient SEO tricks like passing link anchor text and PageRank.

It’s enough if you take away from this series a desire to look beyond the formulaic nonsense that you’ve been handed for years. It’s enough if you sit down and analyze what you’ve done. You should not need to ask for analytical help in an SEO forum when your site loses its rankings. If you have been building links for some time and you suddenly lose rankings, you know why you lost your rankings: you were depending on links.

Links should be dependent upon you and your Web site. You should not make your Web site dependent upon links. That’s a hard lesson for most of today’s SEOs to learn. But when you look at backlinks through a different perspective, you’ll start to see why numbers of backlinks are meaningless.

I’m sure I’ll come back to linking theory in the future, but this post concludes the series on Backlink Theory. I hope you found it worthwhile.