by Michael Bemis
I received a call from my friend John the other day. He'd been in a conversation with a young lady who proclaimed that her site was a major success!
After all, she had five hundred links.
I had a look at the site. Sure enough, she had five hundred links. Outbound links that is. There were only fifteen inbound links and some of those were questionable.
There still seems to be some confusion about links and what they mean for your website in terms of Search Engine rankings.
Outbound links are those which are placed on your site. They are your recommendation of the content contained in the site to which they link. Think of them as a service to your clients, a place where they can find additional relevant information relating to their area of interest.
Recommendation and Service are the operative terms here. If the site to which you are contemplating a link does not contain valuable content that will be of service to your clients or potential clients, why would you put your seal of approval on it?
In terms of Search Engine ratings, outbound links accrue value to the site to which they link. They accrue little or no value to you. In fact, their most important reflection on you is the value of the information they convey.
Linking to five hundred sites which include everyone and their dog only serves to annoy potential clients and discourage further visits to your site and perhaps place of business.
Inbound links are those which direct people to your site, someone else's recommendation of you, your business and quality of content contained on your site. Inbound links accrue in your favor in Search Engine ratings with the following proviso: they must come to you from a site that has relevant content with respect to your business or concept and the site from which they come should be well rated amongst the sites which address like subject matter.
Quality is of far greater importance than quantity! One hundred inbound links from poorly rated sites or those with little relevance are of less value to you than a single link (read recommendation) from the top site in the industry.
One last word about inbound links: Do not buy links from link farms or other such schemes in an attempt to trick the search engines into giving your site a higher ranking in the results pages.
These folks weren't born yesterday, they know all of the schemes and they'll penalize you for it.
Forwarned is four armed...
It’s better to have 35% of the people really charged up about you and the rest hate you, than 100% not care.
Donny DeutschLove it. You have given us so much more than I ever envisioned.
You are #1 in my book!
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