Find The Right Neighborhoods To Link With
As they say in real estate, it’s all about “location, location, location.” Who you link to and the types of sites where your links point to say a lot about your website.
Generally speaking, search engines interprets a link as a ‘vote’ for the site it points to. In addition, they also analyze the pages that links to a site. In other words, a link from a good page on a good authoritative site counts ‘more’ than a link from lesser location. And while you can’t control who links to you, you do have control over who you link to.
Why is who you link to important? Because if you link to a ‘bad neighborhood’ website, you are, basically, vouching for it. In other words, you put your site’s credibility on the line with each outbound link. Simply linking to bad neighborhoods could entail a penalty to your own site rankings. If you’re into link exchanges or you sell direct links, be very careful about who you link to.
Unless the theme of your website matches, you should generally avoid exchanging links with link farms, adult, pharmacy, gambling or online casino sites. These are the sites that can constitute ‘bad neighborhoods’. Because such sites are prone to spamming, search engines will likely reduce link value — and, again, possibly penalize your site just for linking to them.
PageRank and the link popularity of a site is a good measure of how a site is viewed. Although these factors can sometimes be manipulated, you can usually get a good idea of how trustworthy a specific page might be by checking these variables.
That’s why you need to know all you can about your link partners, so you won’t finding yourself associated with a bad neighborhood.
The goal of WebAdClassifieds.com will be to help create a more open and secure marketplace for link and sponsorship opportunities of every stripe.
September 26th, 2007 at 9:02 am
I found your article very interesting, and it backs up my gut feeling about who you link to. Thanks for putting it in writing. It’s a real battle between getting the word out about your blog, and keeping it up to your own standards. Great article.