A Famous linking Case Study

A famous story that illustrates the importance, impact and power of linking is to study the case of the biographical page for President George W. Bush.

If one were to search using Google using terms such as:

• President George W. Bush
• Biography George Bush
• 43rd President
• 43rd President of the United States
• President of the United States George W. Bush
• Bio President George Bush

You could expect the biography page for George W. Bush at www.WhiteHouse.gov to be a top page on Google and it is. There are no surprises here. All is as it should be. However, if one were to conduct a search using the term "miserable failure" you may be surprised with the Google search results.

At the end of 2003 when George W. Bush was in his 1^st term as President of the United States if one where to use the phrase "miserable failure" in the Google search field the top page returned by Google would be the bio page for George W. Bush on the WhiteHouse.gov website. How could this be?

Do you think that the White House website webmaster had optimized this page for this term? I think not! In fact the page does not have the term anywhere (I checked - just to be certain). What was going on here demonstrates the power of linking from other websites.

A number of anti-Bush people set up websites and used their blogs with the term "miserable failure" as a text link and pointed the link to the biography page for George W. Bush on the White House website. Since the Google system for ranking websites is based heavily on the number of links pointing to a site and on the text used to make the link the bio page on George W. Bush got a high ranking because of the linking.

The White House had no control over this as the text and the links were from other websites and blogs and the White House had no control over them.

Linking can be a powerful way to get higher rankings in Google. To get a high ranking the number of links and the quality of the websites linking will be factors. You will need more or less depending on the competitive situation for any given search term. The higher the competition the more links a website will need.

If you want a higher position in the search engines then you need to have a linking strategy and strong tactics for implementing them. Website linking Tactics makes this easy and affordable for you.