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Director at The Winchester Diet
09 January 2004 07:23am
I am constantly being asked to accept Links. Advice please on the pro's & con's of accepting Links to other's website ? Julie Brown
Fndr at Majestic12.co.uk
09 January 2004 10:04am
My pro and cons follow from the most likely reason why you are being asked for links - play along with Google's PageRank system that relies on sites linking to each other.
Pros: you are likely to gain links yourself, so your rankings will be affected too
Cons: The affect on you might be negative - Google is in constant fight with search engine spammers and they can penalise not just them but also sites THEY linked to, as well as sites who linked to them.
Bottom line is that if a reputable site that does not compete with you offers to swap links then it might be beneficial for yourself to participate in link exchange.
Good forum to read on Links Exchange as well as other matters is WebMasterWorld - http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum12/
(some forums there have to be paid for but most are open).
Senior SEO at Weboptimiser
23 January 2004 15:10pm
>> Links Exchange as well as other matters is WebMasterWorld
Thanks for the plug Alex ;) To clarify, there is one paid access forum, Supporters, which you can choose to subscribe to, or not. Signup is still free, as is access to, and participation in all the public forums. The Supporters Forum is not a glittering cave containing the secret of the google algo, but it is worth the price of entry for internet professionals
To return to the question, links :
Google have stated that they WILL penalise you for linking to "bad neighbourhoods" (link farms, known persistent spammers, banned damains etc). They will NOT penalise you for links TO your site. Otherwise it would be easy to get your competitors banned by submitting them to every dodgy FFA link farm on the web (actually, you have to work harder than that to get your competitors banned ;) but not much)
Don't be tempted to purchase a load of domains, and point the links to your site though. Unless you are a pro, G may well be able to determine that you ARE the owner of the offending domains, and ban the lot, INCLUDING your "clean" domain. This is a technique know as "domain farming" and is frowned upon (ie will get you banned)
Don't be afraid to link out to genuine request either though. Links out to quality, on topic, high PR sites in your area can improve your ranking (for the geeks amongst us, they improve your "hub-like" score. Links in improve your "authority-like" score). Without going into the maths, bear in mind that SEs want to reqasr sites that give a good experience to users. Providing links to other quality sites in your niche falls under that heading
Partner Management at Talus Labs
29 January 2004 15:53pm
One thing to watch out for when exchanging links with other sites is that Google has recognised that a lot of links are put up to help increase page rank. Because many sites just exchange links by adding the link to the other site in a special links section or page, Google is tweaking its bots to ignore any content that is obviously a links page or section. If the page or section is titled "Links" then Google will ignore these links now. Instead it is better to use another name such as "resources", or to make the list not so obvious.
T.
http://blogopoly.blogspot.com