Ask Marketing Experts search engine marketing forum

[admin]

Links are an essential portion of a SEO campaign - they are one branch of the marketing tree.

Google was the first search engine to use link popularity as a major factor for ranking websites. It has unquestionably been successful, and many other search engines are using this technique as well.

Basically, link popularity means that the more sites that link to you the more relevant your site must be, therefore you get better rankings. In case you take this to mean that getting 1000 unrelated websites to link to you is what this means, please continue reading and do some more research.

Incoming links are only valuable if they come from a similarly themed website that has its own popularity. Small, unimportant sites will have little or no effect on your link popularity.

Remember, when linking its all about relevance, not quantity.

[7thDsites]

This is absolutely the truth and becoming more important with each day of the search engines evolving.

Wild random linking can in some instances bring a little benefit to your site for the short term but long term will hinder the progress and advancement of your site as well as potentially getting your site penalized.

Though for 5 years now I have been spouting and spouting these things I see more link farms today than ever before; in fact some of the 'professional' link builders are using their own internal network of non-related sites to build link pop to client sites - this is seriously bad and harmful to the client sites!

Before you hire someone to build links for you; ask and make sure the links that they'll build to your site are related yet not competing with you.

[host1.com]

Hello,

In my opinion, there are exactly two factors to consider when selecting a good link exchange partner: (1) community (2) authority. Is this site part of the same community as my site? Is this site an authority?

Community. As Google becomes increasingly sophisticated, I think that less weight will be given to links from unrelated sites as I believe 7thDsites suggested. If you exchange links with unrelated sites, you can confuse Google. Where should your site come up? Are you part of the pharmaceuticals community or the professional services community?

Authority. What is the PageRank of the page where my link would be placed? (You can view the 0-10 PageRank of any given webpage by downloading the Google Toolbar directly from the Google website.) Does this site deserve the PageRank it has? Is this sites RageRank likely to increase or decrease?

Hope this helps.

Jon Maher
Founder & CEO
Host1
http://www.host1.com

[admin]

well said host1!

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