Bad Links
Some links are bad... for example, if you are a car sales company
and you've got dozens of completely irrelevant links to international
hotel sites... yeah, YOU know the ones! in Prague, Munich, Shanghai
etc! That's a BAD neighbourhood over there! That IS going to put a
world of hurt on you! And as for the Free For All link sites, web
rings, and 3 way link schemes... that's just suicide in cyberspace!
Why? Coz its a blatant and completely indefensible attempt at cheating
the system!
Reciprocal Links - Almost a Waste of Effort
Reciprocal links are still of some value, providing the link titles
are explicit, and if the page they link to you from has a higher Page
Rank than the page from which you link to them. The concept of a link
to you being a vote for you, and being added to your site's Total Vote
Count has a flip side. A link from you to someone else essentially
deducts one vote from your total vote count... meaning its value is
minimal when compared to a 1-way incoming back-link!
1-way Outward Links Are Toxic
Ok, lets assume you are a service provider, maybe a health clinic,
and you deal with hospitals, other doctors, specialists, nurses,
laboratories. So, as a benefit to your visitors, you place direct links
to their web resources on your links page. Is that clever?
Most certainly it is NOT! Transfusion time, because you'll be
haemorrhaging Page Rank with nothing in return! Do it, but be smart
about it, because there is NOTHING to be gained (by you) from linking
to any site that does not link back. So make sure your links include
the "nofollow" attribute that tells SE's that the link is NOT a vote by
your site for that site!
Link Content Is Mission Critical
This is mission critical because Google and other have decided that
they can't trust you to be honest about your site! Basically, it seems
like there are two web tribes - those who know not so much about how
things work, and those who know more than they should. There should
also be a flourishing third tribe, who just build great sites with lots
of terrific content that automatically ranks highly - but nobody's seen
nuthin' from those guys for ages!
The tribe who know more than they should ruthlessly
manipulate every available loophole to dominate search engine rankings,
at the expense of those who have yet to read SEO For Dummies.
Therefore, Google decided that its essential that there is some
external correlation between what YOU say your site is about, and what
OTHER people say your site is about... This is done by analysing the
words in the Link Title on all links pointing to your site. Bottom line
here is - if a keyword phrases does NOT appear on links to your site,
you ain't gonna rank for that phrase!
For many established sites, this is the main reason they
might have experienced a noticeable decline in rankings in the last few
months. Most older sites will have a majority of incoming links based
on their business name, and NOT on their activities / products /
services / location etc. To use the common "widgets" analogy - if you
are selling "widgets" and all your incoming link titles have your only
business name e.g. Smiths Manufacturing Co Ltd, its now very difficult
for you to rank for "widgets"!
Backlink analysis reveals this shortcoming rather quickly
and, lucky for you, it is possible to remedy this by building 1-way
incoming back-links using multiple Title / Description combinations
that contain a good spread of relevant keywords. It does require some
keyword research, and it is tedious - but if you don't do it, you are
certainly not going forwards! But your competitors might be...
