I’ve been doing some pondering about linking between sites. This is a first draft so it is fairly wobbly.
It is pretty well accepted that the key to Google’s heart is to have plenty of quality links pointing to your web pages. Even better if these links contain your keywords in the anchor text.
Now that this secret is well and truely out, it has become wide open to exploitation and every two bit webmaster and their affiliates are out there on the interweb trying to track down links to their sites. Not that there is anything wrong with chasing links. In fact good links can be a solid sources of traffic for new websites while you are waiting for your search engine listings to kick in.
Ideally you should be encouraging links from 3 sources:-
1. Authoritive sites such as directories. These links will usually be one way ie there is no link exchange. Some sites may require a link swap but the more authoritive sites should link to you because they believe that you have a quality site.
2. Sites that are similarly themed to your own. You’ll probably have to ask for a link swap however this may not be required if the site owner likes your site or they think it may be of benefit to their readers .
3. One way links from general sites. These links could be because someone genuinely likes your site, or they’ve reprinted something from your site such as an article or a press release. Perhaps you offer a tool or a service that they believe is worth promoting. Try adding linking instructions to your site. The Link to us page on The Australian Dating Guide provides an example of how to do this.
What to watch out for:
1. Bad neighbourhoods inc. link farms (interlinked sites especially created to cheat search engines)
2. Obvious links pages – Where possible try to get links to your site that integrate with the content of the page. A post on someones blog for example. You may want to avoid pages that have obviously been created with common link exchange tools. Search engines have been know in the past to penalise these pages. Linking tools like can be useful if you are new to link building but it worth taking the time to edit the pages they create.
3. Page rank hoarders – These are sites that offer to swap links but don’t provide a true link back to your site. They use a javascript link or a CGI redirect to your site. To check for this look at the sources code to see if the a tags point directly to the urls (hint: you should see something like href=http://www.mysite.com in the a tags).
4. link removers – these guys offer to swap links then remove the link later
5. Low content and unfinished sites – check before you link. You should consider any link you make in terms of how useful it is for your audience/customers. If the site is crap then don’t link to it.
6. Affiliate gateway pages – These are sites that are essentally gateways to other websites. For example someone will register a domain and have all visitors redirected to the real site. Often they put their affiliate code in the redirect url so that they can claim credit for any purchases you make. I’m not against affiliate sites as such – in fact we run affiliate programs on our sites as a way of raising revenue. However I am feed up with receiving link submissions for sites that redirect to common affiliate programs and we now have a rule with our directories – 1 listing per unique website. If two site have identical content then we will only link to one. However if the sites are sufficiently different and offer valuable content then we will link to both.
7. Badly managed link requests
– Nothing beats a nice friendly email with a little bit of detail about your site and why you think it would be worth the webmaster linking to you.
– Don’t go chasing links from irrelivant websites unless the webmaster is a shameless link whore.
– Before emailing, check if the site has an “add you link” page and use it if it does.
– Avoid patronising link requests. Most webmasters know how good their site is and they know the value of linking, so there is no need to tell them so.
– Sending threatening “we will remove your link is if you don’t link to us” and repeated “You have’t linked to us yet” reminders just makes you look like a dickhead.
Anyway taking the time to build a solid link campaign can be a powerful way of increasing the traffic to your website. Set yourself a target – try 1 link a day or 1 link a week and see what happens. Also don’t forget the power of linking within your website. Link your pages together with meaningful descriptive links and include a site map. Not only will these help the search engine rankings of your pages, it will ensure that your site is fully crawled by search engines.