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It happens all the time. Google ignores your inbound links. And it happens in many ways. Most people in the SEO community still don’t seem to have got the message, though.

Why is it that Google ignores inbound links? Isn’t SEO all about links? Of course not.

The question implied by the expression “google ignoring my inbound links” might be better phrased as: “Why does my link building suck?”

If you were to ask someone like Rand Fishkin whether links influence search results, he’d be quick to point that indeed they do influence search results. He’d also be in a position to point you to many articles about link building that he and others have written through the years.

And if you’ve ever looked at the backlink profile for SEOmoz then you’d probably reasonably conclude that Rand has done a good job of building links. Go ahead. Conclude that. I know I have.

But here’s the rub: How do you sort out the value-passing links from the non-value-passing links? No one knows.

What we can be pretty sure of is that anyone who feels compelled enough to ask “why is google ignoring my inbound links” probably either has the wrong SEO strategy (too much dependence upon links) or the wrong links. Let’s take a look at both issues.

Depending on links is bad SEO – Why? Because links provide you with only limited points of relevance. A typical link won’t help you chase the long tail of SEO and it is the long tail where new search visibility stars are born. Search engines tell us that they have never seen 20-25% of all queries before. Hence, there won’t be any SEO competition for those queries. If you just happen to develop the right content for a previously unused query, you’ll zoom right to the top when people search on it.

Links don’t do that for you. Why? Because they rarely target previously unused queries. Even so-called “natural” links often use anchor text that has been used many times before.

Now, you might say you’re trying to be competitive and therefore you need links for existing queries. Sure, that makes sense. But if you’re only trying to compete on the basis of links, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage compared to anyone who wants to do SEO the right way.

You just get the wrong links is a very common problem in SEO. But it’s not as simple as that. It’s very easy to acquire links today that to all observers seem perfectly reasonable and acceptable and learn only a month later that the search engines have revised their guidelines — or that the linking sites have turned on “rel=’nofollow’”.

In most cases, you’re not obtaining “illegal” or “morally unacceptable” links, you’re just getting the wrong links. Every link has a life expectancy and the value associated with that link has a life expectancy. In SEO terms we should be more interested in the life expectancy of link value. Many sites do now routinely add “rel=’nofollow’” to their user-contributed links.

Too many SEOs have drunk of the social media wine and having become drunk with that wine they ran out and obtained all the social media links they could. Those links have the bad habit of vanishing quickly when accounts are banned, services collapse, or service providers change the way they link out. Furthermore, when a search engine devalues a whole new class of links there are ripple effects that sweep across the indexed Web.

It’s not easy to find good linking resources and you’re not as likely to find them in popular SEO blogs and forums as by accident. Why? Because when enough SEO people gang up on a linking resource they usually ruin it for everyone.

You may just need to do better linking resource research, depending less on what you find in SEO forums and blogs and more on what you find by yourself. You won’t find any “secret” resources, but you need to keep the resources you use a secret from other SEOs as much as can be reasonably expected.

Google doesn’t want to ignore your inbound links. It just wants to ignore links that should not be passing value. The same is true for all search engines, but each search engine has its own criteria for determining how to value links.

And that leads to my final point: You cannot use outside tools to peek over a search engine’s shoulder. No matter how many people tell you to use link research tools, DON’T — not for finding good sources of links. Those tools cannot tell you if the links they know about are indexed in or valued by any particular search engine.