Gaining a high Google ranking is all about building quality links, it has been claimed.

Patrick Altoft, director of Blogstorm, commenting on his e-consultancy column, explained that a newly-launched website is not trusted by Google at all, and that the site must attract links in order to gain trust.

However, according to Mr Altoft, the best links are not always to similar products or services.

Major blogs and news sites, alongside anything that receives a certain amount of attention from the mainstream press are more valuable, he claimed.

He explained: “These can also be quite relevant as usually the article linking to you is related to your niche - even though the rest of the site isn’t.”

Mr Altoft added that linking to already trusted sites is often a successful move, alongside submitting links to directories such as Business.com and the Yahoo! Directory.

Google is currently the market leader in search engines, performing 58.4 per cent of all US searches in December, according to digital measuring service comScore.

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