Hello World,
Links are the lifeblood of any successful site on the Internet. Without internal links how would visitors find their way around your site? Without outbound links how would visitors find their way to other related sites of interest? And, without inbound links how would some of your visitors find you? Not only that, for good search engine optimization inbound links aren`t an option - they are a necessity. Google likes to see a site where pages are linked to one another in a clear, organized manner. They are quite happy when they see your links going out to quality sites. But, most of all, they want to see that other sites have a good `opinion` of your site. And the only real way they can tell that is if you have inbound links. Inbound links indicate that your site is well thought of, and a valuable resource for Internet users. That being the case Google finds it hard to resist ranking your site highly, depending of course on other factors such as keywords.
The challenge, therefore, is to get other sites to link with yours. Getting a couple of hundred sites to link overnight with yours is easy. The idea is you link to theirs and they do the same with you. Reciprocal linking at its worst! Google isn`t stupid. It sees a sudden jump of your links and immediately the alarm bells ring. What`s just as bad is the chances are that many of those inbound links are are from low-quality, and/or irrelevant sites anyway, so link value is virtually zero. Link farms are a waste of time (and usually money), so don`t waste your time and effort with them.
Now that isn`t to say that reciprocal linking in itself is harmful. That is not the case. It is just that the site you link with should, ideally, be a quality site, and hopefully have a similar topic to yours. If yours is a new site it is very unlikely you are going to get free links from old, established, high PR sites. You have to get established first, providing quality content and build up a good reputation. That takes time, and there are no reliable shortcuts to this.
What about the links themselves, both the text used in the link, and the page on your site it points to?
Natural looking links work the best. So, do not use exactly the same anchor text every time. Change the text around, and of course if you are linking to different pages on your site it is especially important to use anchor text relative to that particular page. And talking about linking to various pages, remember that some visitors might not be interested in your home page. You might have a site, for instance, about foreign holidays. One of your pages might be about the Greek Islands. If another site on the topic of Greece was to link to yours surely you would want a link pointing to your internal page on Greek Islands, with the appropriate anchor text. So, in conclusion, build your inbound links up slowly, over time. If you have to reciprocate that is fine, as long as the other site is of some quality. Use different anchor text where you have some say on that, and link to a number of your pages, not just one or two. (by : Brian Krassentein)
The challenge, therefore, is to get other sites to link with yours. Getting a couple of hundred sites to link overnight with yours is easy. The idea is you link to theirs and they do the same with you. Reciprocal linking at its worst! Google isn`t stupid. It sees a sudden jump of your links and immediately the alarm bells ring. What`s just as bad is the chances are that many of those inbound links are are from low-quality, and/or irrelevant sites anyway, so link value is virtually zero. Link farms are a waste of time (and usually money), so don`t waste your time and effort with them.
Now that isn`t to say that reciprocal linking in itself is harmful. That is not the case. It is just that the site you link with should, ideally, be a quality site, and hopefully have a similar topic to yours. If yours is a new site it is very unlikely you are going to get free links from old, established, high PR sites. You have to get established first, providing quality content and build up a good reputation. That takes time, and there are no reliable shortcuts to this.
What about the links themselves, both the text used in the link, and the page on your site it points to?
Natural looking links work the best. So, do not use exactly the same anchor text every time. Change the text around, and of course if you are linking to different pages on your site it is especially important to use anchor text relative to that particular page. And talking about linking to various pages, remember that some visitors might not be interested in your home page. You might have a site, for instance, about foreign holidays. One of your pages might be about the Greek Islands. If another site on the topic of Greece was to link to yours surely you would want a link pointing to your internal page on Greek Islands, with the appropriate anchor text. So, in conclusion, build your inbound links up slowly, over time. If you have to reciprocate that is fine, as long as the other site is of some quality. Use different anchor text where you have some say on that, and link to a number of your pages, not just one or two. (by : Brian Krassentein)
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More information on Linking can be found at the Webmaster forum at MMG.
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