Page 1 of 3
No, it's not a general question for all and sundry. Obviously,there are many who would want to link to a Home Business orAffiliate program related website and for good reason. Theywould be helping their Page Rank, if that's important any morehowever, more to the point, they would be improving theirchances of a better ranking in the SERPs (Search Engine ResultsPages). But yes, you guessed it, THERE IS A PROVISO. A veryimportant one, that so many people engaged in reciprocal linkingprograms just don't seem to be able to get their heads around... Imust confess, I have written about this same subject, just ontwelve months ago, I think it was. My experience during the timesince would suggest that I may as well have been writing fairystories, for all the good it did. I get, and this is noexaggeration, at least a dozen requests EVERY day from peoplewishing to link with my (currently seven) Home Business orAffiliate related sites, who have websites that have absolutelyNOTHING in common in a
ny way with either topic, or in the caseof Affiliate content websites I have, nothing to do with thesubject matter or product/s concerned. The majority of theserequests, for some reason, seem to come from'poker/casino/gambling' websites and those concerning'travel/holidays'. Why is it that the people requesting theselinks don't understand that they are, in fact, irreparablydamaging their websites and possibly harming their chances of adecent showing in the SERPs? (Not that all those with thesetypes of websites practice this type of 'free for all' linking).Why can't they understand that Google the devisors of the PR andthe Search Engine with whom most are concentrating on scoring agood ranking, quite clearly explain that "...links from RELEVANTwebsites are the only kind of link that is likely to improveyour SE rankings". They also go on to say that "using any kindof mass linking program or 'free for all' method of linking ismore likely to damage your rankings". While it's true that yourPR will probably increase with the amount of 'raw' links to yourwebsite, those links that are from websites of non-relevanttopics will NOT serve to improve your ranking in the SERPs.Where the PR is calculated simply from the number of links, thealgorithm used to come up with the SERPs definitely includesmore complex data including an analysis of the content of thewebsites from which incoming links come, not just the text ofthe link. The only advantage I know of, that PR alone will giveyou is a better chance of obtaining reciprocal links from otherwebsites. Certainly, a far better way to obtain links is topublish good quality articles about the topic of your website,which of course will be picked up, by and large, by websiteslooking for good content of the same subject matter. This willalso serve to give you 'one way' incoming links, which althoughGoogle don't appear to mention in their pages, are widelyunderstood to be of more value than 'reciprocal links'. Apartfrom the reasons I've mentioned above, there is also the amountof work involved in trying to do the right thing by answeringthese pointless requests for links. I must say, it's veryannoying given the time involved, which could be better spent byall parties doing more constructive things. I have oftenlamented the irreparable damage that mass linking programs havedone to many websites. After all, there is virtually no chanceof getting the links that are in place from non-relevantwebsites removed. It would be a mammoth task. The types of linkbuilding program that collect links from anyone willing tocomplete the form on your website and place your link on theirs,have turned a number of websites into mini directories, whichcertainly won't help their rankings in the SERPs. My advice toanyone, either new or an old hand is to join one of thereciprocal linking co-operatives like Linkmarket.net, in whichyou are able to approve links from sites of YOUR choosing andrequest links from sites with the same content and subject
RSS Subscribe 
Comments