Ask Marketing Experts search engine marketing forum

[admin]

With the Google search engine your site falls into 2 general categories: a hub (portal) or an authority (descriptive resource). Decide which one you are and stick with it. It is better to be focused and concentrated rather than scattered and obscure.

Users (and search engines) come to hubs to find information about multiple topics of a specific subject. Hubs have many links and are highly diluted with links. This is good because it increases the total number of pages that are spiderable. You are a Yahoo - providing wide arrays of information.

Authority pages contain relatively few outgoing links and keep the user (or search engine) on the page. Authority pages are not likely to be found with backward crawling and generally have a higher pagerank than hubs. Bobs plumbing glossary is an example of an authority page.

Hubs lead to authority pages, which in turn link to each other. You will most likely get many links from hubs, as a link from an authority page is rare and prized.

All linking should be done with the end user in mind. If the only reason you engage in link exchange programs is for search engines, it is likely your site will be less usable and dysfunctional.