16.1. Some Incoming Links Can Help Your Rankings…
September 6, 2008 by Andy
…while others have little or no effect. Some can even hurt you!
Now, just so you to relax a bit, let me just explain the last bit. The links that can hurt you are the ones coming from your own sites on unrelated niches, especially if those links are reciprocated. Cross-linking your own sites use to be a great way to get a new site indexed and a PR boost. However, as search engines have evolved, so has the definition of spamming. Cross-linking unrelated sites you own is a big no no, so don’t do it.
Now, what about those links that have little or no effect on your rankings?
1. Well, these include links on other sites that use the rel="nofollow" tag somewhere in the link. This is a relatively new tag embraced by the search engines to stop link spamming from blogs. When a site links to you and puts that bit of code in the link HTML, the search engines do not follow the link, do not spider the destination link, and do not pass on Page Rank or Link Reputation to the destination URL.
2. Another type of link that wont help you is when the webpage that has the link uses a meta tag similar to this one:
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive,nofollow,noindex"/>
This meta tag tells the search engines not to spider the links on the page, not to index those links, and not to archive the current page.
These are two techniques are things you should look out for when exchanging links with other webmasters. If they use either technique, you get no benefit other than the possibility of visitors following the link to your site. However, they obviously do not help your search engine rankings.
3. A third type of link has little or no effect on your rankings. These are the ones that are on low PR pages with lots of other outgoing links on the page. The effect on your rankings will be negligible. Any PR that exists on the page will be divided between all outgoing links on the page. The lower the PR, the less benefit you get. The more links on the page, the less benefit you get.
This should be another consideration on exchanging links. Not so much the PR of the page, as that will increase over time, but the number of links on the page.
4. A 4th type of link that wont help you, is a link on an unrelated page. e.g. if your site is about RGP contact lenses, a link to your site on a page about banana plantations wont help you much. Search engines are certainly better able to decide on link relevancy than a lot of webmasters think, and this capability is only going to improve. My advice is, and always has been – only get links from highly related sites or pages.
Pheew! There is a lot to check when you get incoming links, isn’t there?
Well, now onto the links that will help you.
There really is only one category here – links on quality, highly related pages. If the link is not reciprocated, so much the better.
Some sites are called "Authority Sites", and links on these will benefit you the most. These types of site typically have high PR, and it is also typically difficult to get links from them.
It is because of this difficulty in getting incoming authority links that I was very excited to read about a new product that was coming out which promises "Unlimited Supply of PageRank 5+ Backlinks from AUTHORITY SITES…"
You will have seen a lot of top marketers promoting this product (even before it has been released), so I was excited to get a preview copy.
This product has now been released.
As I was going through the materials, I was initially very excited. This was something I had not thought of, or tried myself. What’s more, I could see how it worked, and that it would work.
I also did a bit of digging, and found some quality website were using this technique.
So, a technique that can get you high PR backlinks with just a few minutes of your time. Sounds almost too good to be true….
Well, as I continued reading the book, my initial excitement died down. Later in the book, the author describes some applications of this technique that fully automate this link building, and therein lies my one big concern about this technique. It undoubtedly works, and works well, but, as with all revolutionary techniques like this, it will be picked up by spammers, and abused. If and when this happens, the search engines will need to find ways to combat its effectiveness (much like they did for blog and ping).
This book opened my eyes to a new method of getting backlinks, and I WILL be using some of the techniques I learnt, though I will be using them sparingly.
As with all techniques like this, it will be abused. I don’t recommend you buy this unless you really want to learn this technique. I feel that it will be short lived, and while I don’t see sites being penalised for using the technique, I do think its effectiveness will decline rapidly as search engines take measures to combat link spam of this type.
In the next chapter, we will look at how you can track your visitors while on your site, and also see how they found your site in the first place, plus much more information. Analysing your traffic can help you increase your traffic, and increase conversion rates.
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