Linking, the Good and the Bad and the Unknown

I have covered linking pretty well in the past, but with the recent confusion caused from one of our competitor's emails circulating amongst our clients it may be time to update this topic. It constantly amazes me how many companies resort to lies and innuendo to make a sale... and spam...

Linking Defined

Also referred to as hyperlinks Web sites would be nothing without linking. A link provides the method necessary for allowing a visitor to access additional pages (internal links) on a given site, tools or other websites (external links). Links can be text or embedded withing objects. Links are not always discernible, but usually your cursor will change appearance when traveling over a link. For the sake of user friendliness, links are usually easy to find.

Backlinking is a link that resides on another site pointing to your website and the type of link that we are interested in for this discussion.

Good Linking

If people are going to find your website they will probably do so while looking at a website and seeing a reference to your site. Word of mouth helps, as do radio and other forms of advertising, but in the end it is usually backlinking that provides the bulk of the visitors. Once your site has been around for a while the search engines will start sending more people to your website.

This being the case, a site owner would be well served to take the initiative in finding sites that will link to their website.

The search engines quickly recognized the importance of backlinking and will associate a backlink as a vote of confidence for a website. The more backlinks the better as far as the search engines are concerned. These links are the best manner in submitting a website as the search engines will find your website while traversing other sites.

To read more, I would encourage you to access these pages:

http://www.optimize-my-website.com/sep/news/helping-sep.htm

http://www.optimize-my-website.com/sep/news/about-google.htm

http://www.optimize-my-website.com/submission.htm

Additionally, Google's webmaster blog explains, "It's important to make sure that content and navigation can be rendered/negotiated using only HTML. So long as the content and navigation are the same for search crawlers and end users, you're more than welcome to use advanced technologies such as Flash and/or Javascript to improve the user experience using a richer presentation."

These latter details are written mostly for web developers, but none the less something to think about.

Bad Linking

As is the case with all aspects of search engine optimization, linking can be abused. People were quick to pick up on adding backlinks for their website. Link exchange programs have become quite popular. The first thing that Google started filtering was reciprocal linking; two websites pointing at each other. Then Link Farms started appearing. There are good links farms, but for the most part link farms are something to avoid at all costs. For instance, I link my clients' sites to one another taking into consideration not including backlinks to sites less than 200 miles away and trying to keep more of the sites similarly grouped in subject manner. When this becomes an issue is where the group contains tens of thousands of sites and/or the sites do not have any content on them except for more links.

Google states on their webmaster blog, "Before you begin cross-linking sites, consider the user's perspective and whether the crosslinks provide value. If the sites are related in business -- e.g., an auto manual site linking to an auto parts retail site, then it could make sense -- the links are organic and useful. Cross-linking between dozens or hundreds of sites, however, probably doesn't provide value, and I would not recommend it."

Verifying Good verses Bad Links

I wish that this was an easy thing to do, but there are no sure ways to verify whether a site is truly good or bad and worthy of linking from. Even if a site is acceptable today it can change for the worse or the domain name can be sold.

That said, there are some processes worth using to label a site as bad.

Nothing beats a visual once over of a site. A bad link farm is pretty easy to spot as the site will only have pages containing links to other sites. The wording will be such that if you click on this link it will take you to the information that you are searching for only to find another site full of nothing but links.

I personally would only want a site linking to mine if it contained captivating content. You want a visitor to click on the link to your site confident that your site will be as insightful as the site they are traveling from. And that site's owner will not want to link to your site unless it is as powerful as their own.

Another powerful tool is Google's toolbar and PageRank tool which you can find here, http://google.com/toolbar and read about here, http://www.optimize-my-website.com/sep/news/Google-Toolbar-PageRank.htm . Once installed you will need to enable the pagerank option and permit it to share your visitation history with Google. If a website has been around for a year or more and Google likes it then it will have a pagerank of at least one or more. Note that I do not give this tool any more value than this as the toolbar pagerank is enormously misunderstood and should be treated as entertainment value only... except for this test. You will notice when using this tool that not only does a website have a pagerank but each page on the site can have a differing pagerank as well. It is fun to note that the company mentioned above that spammed our clients concerning our linking practices did not have a pagerank for their own site and yet the link pages on our clients' sites did contain a rank value. Also know that Search Engine Optimization is not built on a static rule set. The search engines regularly adjust how they prioritize sites. When we find that something is no longer working or detrimental we adjust our methods. We also err on conservativeness to avoid bad optimization practices.

These tests are no guarantee, but they are a great rule of thumb and a good starting place in finding good sites to link from.

I can not over emphasis the need to verify a site before requesting them to link to your site as a bad site that has been devalued by a search engine when linking to your site can cause a negative ranking value to be applied to your site. And yes, the unscrupulous have been known to add links to their competitor's sites from a bad site thus gaining value for their own site by damaging the value of their competitors. This is as bad as nuclear war and lawyers; nobody can win these underhanded battles; AVOID this kind of game play.

Linking can be an extremely powerful tool, but please use it with care.