SUBMIT 2.0

Most people know that building links to your site is absolutely crucial for improving your search engine ranking. In general terms, the more links you have pointing to your site, the more reputable or important the search engines think you are, and therefore they rank you higher.

But are all links equal? Definitely not. Here’s a brief list of what kinds of links are better than others.

1. One way links are better than reciprocal links. Generally speaking, if a website links to you, that link will carry more weight if you do not link back to them. In many instances, the search engines see “reciprocal links” and just basic link swapping. However, if a site links to you without a link back, that is often seen as a more genuine link of interest

2. Links from more reputable/popular sites are better than links from unpopular sites. Google assigns a “Page Rank” for each page on the Internet, which is similar to a measure of the page’s “reputation” or “popularity”. The higher this page rank, the more weight the link has for you. Well known and popular sites (eg. Amazon.com) have high Page Rank, and therefore are far more valuable that links from unpopular websites

3. Links from sites that are related in content are more valuable than unrelated links. So for example if your website is about shoes, then a link from another site about shoes, or perhaps even foot care or clothing, will be more valuable than a link from a site about flowers.

4. The “anchor text”, which is the words used in your link, are important. Again using the shoes example, if your site is about shoes then links containing the words shoes are better than links containing the words flowers (for example)

5. Being part of a bad link “neighbourhood” can also be bad for your site. The most extreme cases of these is if you join any kind of articial link building system, like the ones that automatically build links between it’s members. Basically anything that is designed to artificially boost link popularity is a bad idea and can get you penalised by the search engines

Source: Ezinearticles

Filed under: Link-Popularity