A guide to basic link strategy
Incoming links play a hugely important role in determining how Google ranks the pages of your website. This is reflected in the Google Page Rank score. To find out a websites page rank download the Google toolbar and then choose to activate the page rank button.
Incoming links into your site or particular page indicate how it is valued by other users and other sites. Generally speaking the more links into the page the more important and valuable that it must be. But there are conditions attached to these links and to your sites.
In previous times the number of incoming links to your site was the sole judge of quality, however, most of the search engines especially Google has placed a judgment on the quality and the relevance to the incoming link. If the linking page and site had a high page rank value itself, then clearly, it knew a good thing when it linked to it. Over time though with the increase in traffic on the web the value of this has become diluted slightly.
If you look at it from a surfers viewpoint having links on a site that lead you to a completely irrelevant site that has nothing at all to do with your original search query is going to bring them no value at all. Importantly they are unlikely to use the link. The search engines know and recognize this and so they place virtually no credence and award no points for these type of links.
So if you were to run an online shop selling cricket equipment, then having a link from a lipstick manufacturer would have no relevance at all. But imagine having lots of links from cricket clubs, now that would be superbly relevant and would be looked on well by the search engines.
The biggest part to realise is that Google places historical factors on the rank that it assigns to you website. General thought on the matter is that part of Google’s method is counting the moment a new site is discovered and then applying a time factor on the site. There is a thought process that indicates Google ‘sand boxes’ domains and no matter what you do in terms of trying to optimise your site you won’t be able to escape the ‘sandbox’ and get good rankings.
Google monitors the amount of links to your site, and the speed at which your site adds the incoming links and how long the link has been active for. It isn’t therefore vital to have hundreds or even thousands of links to your site, but about building those links consistently and with thought over times. This plays a huge part of your basic link strategy
Common thinking at the present time is that the ‘sandbox effect’ and applying the time effect to your website helps to prevent spam and fraudulent sites gaining a foothold in the upper pages of Google. Although your site is genuine and is there for a genuine purpose there are sites that will look to make a very quick fortune by selling inferior products or offering poor services. These sites then close down very quickly leaving no trace of them behind. Because of the sand box effect the chances of this happening are reduced. Basically then, the older your site is and the older the links are coming into it the more kudos is awarded. Conversely, if you have a new site, then despite working hard on a link strategy, Google will in all probability not rank the site highly.
Your link anchor text is also vitally important. Your anchor text is the text which is included in the link – ‘web design’ – ‘click here’ etc. You should not consistently use the same text throughout your site, and even more importantly in the links to your site. The reason for this is because consistent link anchor text is considered as Anchor Spam, in other words you are doing it specifically with the intention of increasing the ‘value’ of that specific keyword. The guide in this case is to vary you link anchor text and to change it around your top five keywords, which helps to maintain consistency with keyword and link rankings.
For example, for ourselves we vary our incoming links like this…
- Web Design
- Ecommerce
- Hosting
- Leicester Web Design
- Guide to Web text
This changes the normal way of thinking. There are many sites which promote users to swap links between themselves. But as we’ve seen, using such link exchanges and link spam simply in order to increase the rankings simply won’t work. Remember the rule age determines everything and make the link relevant to your site.
To talk to us in person if you have queries about basic link strategy
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