18.1. Why Add a Links Page?

OK, if I don’t rate links pages very highly, why do I add them to my sites?

Well, good question. Two main reasons:

1. I add them as a resource for my visitors.

2. I like the fact that I get traffic from my link partners (an often overlooked benefit of link exchanges).

I am happy to exchange links with another site if it meets my criteria. I don’t think that a reciprocal link will hurt you (unless you link to a banned or penalised site, and then it might, or your reciprocal link is between two sites you own) so having a links page is not going to get you into trouble.

If I am going to link to a site from mine, these are the criteria the other site must meet.

The site is 100% related to mine (ie. my visitors would find the other site interesting).

The other site does not use any black hat techniques (these are the techniques we have talked about in this newsletter before like hidden text, keyword stuffing, auto-generated pages etc).

The links page where my link is found only contains links to sites related to mine.

There are no more than 30 links on their links page (including links to their own pages).

If the site is PR0, then I check to see when the site was first created. If it is an old site, I wont link to them.

The other site has a link to their links page from their homepage, so that the search engines can find the links page.

The other webmaster does not use the nofollow tag on the links page, or on the homepage link pointing to the links page.

Any site that contacts me, and meets those requirements, are good sites to link to. Any site that fails to meet those requirements (and most do fail), don’t get a link from me.

These strict criteria often mean that I only exchange one or two links a month (if that). That is fine by me. This method appears much more natural to a search engine than rapid link building, so is likely to be better for your site in the long run.

Since all of this is fairly automated, I have more time to concentrate on the other methods of link building.

One thing that you do need to do regularly is to check up on your link partners. Google have made it clear that your own rankings can be damaged if you link to a site that Google has penalised. This means checking each and every one of your link partners on a monthly basis to make sure they have not been penalised. What you are looking for is any site that has had their PR reduced to zero. These are the sites that can get you into trouble if you continue to link to them. All link partners who have been reduced to PR0 should be deleted from your links page.

Checking up on link partners is a time consuming task (especially as you build more and more sites). Fortunately LinkMachine can generate a report for me that shows which of my link partners have PR0. I can quickly see which sites may have been banned, and take the appropriate action.

If you are building your links pages by hand, or using another script/tool, you could use the highly versatile SEO Elite to automatically check whether your link partners still link to you, and also what their PR is.

Whatever your method of checking, do so once a month for each of your sites.

Your next task is to create a links page. You can use a script like LinkMachine, which helps with all aspects of links page maintenance, or alternatively you can do this by hand. If you do the latter, here are a couple of points to consider:

1. Each link on your links page should have a link to the partner site, plus a description of what that site is about.

2. Include an easy way for other webmaster to contact you. Better still, include a form on your site to allow other webmasters to submit their sites to you.

You can see an example of a simple links page on my ez SEO site. Just click the link at the bottom of the right hand menu.

OK, go and get your links page set up.

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