In May 2003, just a month after the Cassandra update which cracked down on web spam, Google rolled out Dominic. The additions included new bots and a change in how the search engine measured and counted backlinks, which are incoming links to a web page. This has always been a significant ranking factor, and Dominic played a considerable role in enhancing the practice of link building.
Google developed Dominic to supplement Cassandra’s efforts in cracking down on web spam. This time, the update focused on link building and the quality of backlinks that a website has. There were reports that the new bots integrated during this time were ineffective, though.
Plenty of changes in Google’s algorithm were witnessed in May 2003, but the company didn’t officially announce the exact effects of Dominic. A primary observation was that new bots came to crawl the web named Freshbot and Deepcrawler, which reportedly bounced. These web crawlers are programs that automate the process of searching for keywords for indexing content. They evaluate each element of a website from the text, links, sitemaps, and HTML codes.
The algorithm update also saw a change in how Google measured and counted backlinks. It’s part of the search engine’s advocacy to rank only the most relevant websites for a particular topic. Backlinks or incoming links is a major ranking factor since having authority sites cite your page as a source is deemed as a vote of confidence on the trustworthiness and relevance of the information you posted.
Moreover, websites that conducted link building through link farms, which are web pages intended solely for linking to a target domain, were also devalued. It’s considered as a type of spamdexing, or the practice of spamming the index of a search engine.
Nowadays, link building continues to be a crucial part of SEO. This process of acquiring backlinks for your website can improve your ranking on the search engine particularly when you do the best practices and avoid unethical ones like becoming a member of link farms, which may provide you with inbound links but won’t offer something of value to your readers.
Here’s how you can start an effective link building campaign: