An Introduction to Linking

The simple act of linking pages together is the principle on which the World Wide Web is based. With PageRank and other algorithms using linking as one of many factors in determining the position of your page in the results, it is also a major aspect of off-page SEO.

Types of Link

There are several ways of linking sites together. The most obvious is of course whether the link is pointing to your site or away from it.This is important because if you link to a site you are providing a tacit indication of your approval.

Outbound Links

These are links pointing away from your site to another web site.  If you link to irrelevant, low quality web sites with poor content then your site rankings may suffer. However, the reverse is not the case. Your site cannot be banned by poor quality sites linking to your site. Otherwise, it would be a simple matter to add poor quality links to your competitor web sites to reduce their rankings.

Internal links between pages in a web site can also be of benefit, by adding a link to a page within the site you are giving the user an opportunity to visit another page of your web site that has relevance to what they were reading about and so in this respect it is much more important than an internal link on a navigation bar. It also allows you to redistribute PageRank to pages that are normally buried several clicks within the site.

Inbound Links

These are the most important to get your site listed. Relevancy is also the key so if you can get another site that is in the same sector or closely related sector then this will be the best kind of link to have pointing to your site. Ideally, the link will be one way.

For online businesses, it is often difficult to find links that are directly related to your market as the most relevant sites will be your competitors.  However, it may be possible to find links in an associated market. For example if your company sells walking shoes, then it may be possible to obtain links on camping store web sites.

If you have multiple websites, it is tempting to link them together. However, Google is able to read the whois records and is able to determine which server the web sites are hosted from.  If you are going to do this then you need to make sure that they are hosted on different servers and hide the details on your whois records.

Reciprocal Links

As the name suggests, reciprocal links are bi-directional. They link to you; you link to them.  For related web sites these links are still a good idea, however, with the increasing importance of SEO, the practice of linking together any site has abused the reciprocal link and it is not as powerful as it used to be. In my opinion, I think that reciprocal links should still be used but only if they add value to the site.

Be aware that If your site is ranking well, you will receive emails from people asking if you would link to their site and in return they will add a link to their page. Always, checkout the page that they are adding your website to. Chances are it is a low-quality list of links with little PR and probably zero traffic. In return they will often ask for a link on your homepage. Unless it is highly relevant and will benefit you more than them then you should just ignore it.

Having said that, you should not be afraid to link to sites where their information is of good quality, highly-relevant or has been a source of good information.

Three way Links

Three-way linking is an attempt to hide the reciprocal nature of a link. Site A links to site B which links to site C and this links to site A. Search engine are increasingly aware of this ploy and wil not give you credit for it.

Summary

The key here is about relevancy. It may not be necessary to get hundreds of links to rank well for a term if the links that you do have are highly-relevant and come from authority sites.

• Don’t link to sites of poor quality or that are irrelevant
• Use reciprocal links where it would add value for the user
• Add outbound links to sites that have good quality relevant content
• Use internal linking to focus attention on pages that are relevant to the content