| Are you sick
and tired of receiving "I just visited your website.
I linked to it on this page. I would love it if you would
link back to mine" emails? When you go to the page
to locate your URL, if you manage to find it at all, your
site is in the company of hundreds of others. Does this
help your website? Will anyone ever go to that page with
the hundreds of websites and miraculously click on just
yours?
These pages with countless links to other websites were
created during the fervor of link popularity when it was
thought that the more links that linked to your website,
the higher your website ranked in search engines such as
Google. It was also thought that a reciprocal link between
sites, any site, counted in your favor. Link farms sprung
up, and website owners have been bombarded with reciprocal
link requests ever since. Software and entire websites were
launched to make creating link farms easier. But, many SEO
professionals refused to use them, finding them to be a
waste of time and website real estate, and an obvious desperate
measure. My advice to my clients was from a usability perspective.
Pages listing hundreds of websites leading OFF your website
was illogical, especially if your website was trying to
generate sales leads or sell products or services. The appearance
of link farm pages made some websites appear unprofessional.
It didn't take long for search engine databases to become
clogged up with pages upon pages that did nothing more than
link to websites. This was their only purpose. Since search
engines and directories want to provide relevant search
results with quality pages for their users, link farm pages
became quite a nuisance. Search engines began to penalize
websites containing link farm pages. The workaround for
that was to disconnect the link farm pages from the main
site, but keep the game going in an effort to convince people
to link back to your website.
Link Farm Request Checklist
The gig is up. Here's a checklist based on my own experiences,
and those of other webmasters who contributed their thoughts
on the subject in a recent Cre8asiteForums.com thread on
this subject. If any of these seem obvious to you, link
at your own risk:
-
Their site has no possible connection to your subject
matter whatsoever. The page they put your link on isn't
linked to FROM any page, meaning it's floating out there
in never-never land and is a ploy to get you to link to
their site.
- The page where they put your link is on a URL a mile long
and several directories deep so engines will never find
it.
- The page looks like a farmer's field with nicely arranged
rows of links to hundreds of sites which aren't necessarily
organized in any logical manner, but that doesn't matter
because someone told them the link is all that counts.
- It's a link and a link only. No description. No proof the
person ever actually reviewed the site.
- They don't seem to know that links leak PageRank in Google,
not the other way around or that the link that does you
the most good is the one that shares space on a page with
about 2 other outbound links, not 3596 other ones.
- Signs they'll accept anything that shows evidence of being
a "live" link. A true Directory has criteria,
frets about the quality of sites it links to and doesn't
have people out begging for links. Instead the reverse is
true, with people begging to be let in.
- They ask you for a link on your links page, even though
you don't have one.
- Watch for scams such as sub-domain one-way traffic feeders
where the page your site is linked to isn't part of the
main website. Study the URLS carefully before you decide
to accept a link request.
Despite the negative approaches to link requests, there's
definitely good reasons to seek them. If you see a website
that offers something of value to your target audience,
by all means, link to it. I always appreciate hearing from
well researched inquiries. I can tell when someone has studied
my website and has shown me a great spot on theirs to link
mine. They take the extra step of pointing out on my website
where they think their website should be linked. Most times
they're correct.
Remember that it's not just the number of links back to
your website that contribute to your rank jackpot. What
counts is where your URL is placed, the amount and quality
of its neighbor links and whether or not the page is even
linked to the main domain at all. And that's just for starters.
There's a lot more to linking and influence on rank than
just a few basic guidelines. If you really want your website
to rank well, build a good website that people find useful
and want to return to, study branding and how that can help
you, and of course, like everything else in a competitive
environment, promote and market it effectively and wisely.
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