I don’t really have any self-awareness to speak of, but I do know what I like to do on a daily basis. The fact is that when you’re in a new environment, you tend to notice things that are different. For example, when you come back from a long weekend by your car, you notice your house looked different than when you left it. You notice the paint on the walls changes depending on how it was cleaned and painted.
The problem is that there are many things that are the same that you’ll notice when you go through a new place. For example, the same way that a new house will be different from a house you left in the past, the same way that a new paint job will show up differently, the same way that a new carpet will show up differently. That’s because we’re constantly comparing what we like, what we want and what we’re comfortable with.
And when you do this comparison, some things will seem different than what you expect. Our own study of one billion websites found that when you compare the websites you own to the websites you go to on a daily basis, the websites that you visit more often tend to have more popular keywords, higher-quality content, and more links.
A simple way to quantify this is by looking at the average number of links to the website you visit on a daily basis. So if you go to Google and search, “What’s the name of the artist who has a good song?” we’d say that you should visit his and his music site more often than your own website.
It’s a pretty simple formula: You spend more time on the website you visit more often. It’s true that links from websites you visit more often are more likely to be clicked on and therefore increase your ranking in search results. This is the same principle behind a website’s “clicks” being more likely to increase its ranking.
The thing is there are no absolute rules. If you visit a website more often than your own website, then you’ll end up with a higher ranking. So if you have a website, then that website’s ranking should be higher than your own website ranking. This is why a website with a high ranking is likely to link to more websites than a website with a low ranking. So the only way is to visit websites more often.
This same principle applies to social networking sites. If you visit a site more often, then you can associate it with more people, thus increasing its ranking. But if you use Facebook or Twitter, then you need to be more careful about linking to your site. If you click on a link and the website you want to visit is not listed in your News Feed, then you need to be more careful about your linking because a website you visit may have a link somewhere else.
This is why I’m usually not a fan of Facebook—the site is not really designed for people who are interested in other people, anyway. However, this is not always true and if you are not careful, you might be inadvertently creating a link to your website.
I’ve read a few comments about the recent flood of people linking to your site, some saying that it’s a sign Google is giving you a bad ranking, while others are saying that it’s just the normal way that Google works. This is not necessarily true, but it could be the case that Google thinks your website is relevant to its search results, and in these cases, they might link to your website.
Well, I don’t think so. For one, your website is not relevant. For another, Google is not giving the website a bad ranking for it. It’s more likely that Google thinks it’s a link if it’s not relevant. That’s just Google’s way of saying that if it doesn’t have to link to you, it’s not relevant.