mobile SEO

Link reputation is critical to your search engine optimisation—the topicality and trustworthiness of the linking site, the backlink anchor text concentration and your link acquisition trends are all key off-page factors that influence your own site’s authority and hence its Web Search rankings. But are there any parallels that can be drawn on the Mobile Web?

For some time I have stood by a theory concerning how a website is found by Google and the subsequent impact these early days have. Recent tests have led me to believe that the same theory holds true for Google Mobile Search—not surprising in itself.

Background: First came the fear of the dreaded sandbox filter—a dampening factor on new sites competing for monetised (often open to spam) keywords, introduced in the early part of 2004. Then came the observations and analysis from professional SEO’s on how to minimise the trap, followed by a more optimistic period now that a certain amount of relaxation [of the filter] seems to be prevalent—most probably due to the growing algorithmic ability of Google to devalue many forms of manipulative activity without imposing catch-all filters.

My theory is not necessarily unique nor proven, but the evidence is too overwhelming to ignore it. Analyse the search results of any monetised keyword and you will clearly find numerous young sites (less than 12 months old) competing alongside big institutions. Sure these sites will be engaged in accelerating the content building and link acquisition processes, but I am convinced that they have something very specific in common… They’ve all been discovered by Google through reputable sources—other authoritative, trusted, ranking sites—and not free directories, useless reciprocals or saturated social media.

Although Mobile Search indexes are far smaller and algorithms seemingly less aggressive, the theory does cross over:

• Submitting a Google Mobile Sitemap alone is not enough—in all test cases Google preferred to find the new site through a link during a natural crawl
• Any old links were not enough to rank the site—despite strong on-page optimisation
• Strong link acquisition (following on from less reputable link sources) did not rescue the ranking of the site
• Once found through non-reputable sources, new pages still failed to rank—despite strong on- and off-page optimisation

Conclusion: Your first links are the most important links your site will ever get. They conquer filters, they open the doors for strong SEO campaigns, but most of all, they lay the foundation stones for the categorisation of your site. To become a trusted site and to rank for competitive terms you must first be found by the equivalent. And there’s no compromise!