The Truth About
Linking

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27th June 2007

Website Promotion Basics 4
Inbound Links

Two good reasons to strive for inbound links to your website are:

to generate traffic directly from the links,

to increase your website's standing with the search engines.

But not all inbound links are of equal value or effectiveness and if you are going to aim to encourage such links it is as well to consider which are likely to be useful to you.

Generating Traffic. Links are the very basis of the Web. People follow links and, given the right conditions, they should follow them to your website. The links should be clearly presented, in the right context and placed somewhere they are going to be seen.

Links from websites with similar or related subject matter to your own are an obvious advantage. If people are interested in the content of a particular website there is a good chance they will be interested enough to follow links which promise more of the same or similar. So your link text and description should make clear that if they click on your link they will find what they are looking for.

Obviously, it would be unethical and inadvisable to mislead visitors using your links about where they were going or what content they would find when they got there. That said, the desirability of links for people to follow to your website is pretty much a no-brainer.

Influencing the Search Engines. The other argument for inbound links is that the more (appropriate) links a search engine finds to your website the higher it is likely to rate its usefulness and, all else being equal, the higher your website could appear in its search results. This is partly based on the idea that more links can be equated to greater popularity and, by implication, greater usefulness.

This often leads webmasters to spend a good deal of their time, energy and often money too, on acquiring as many inbound links as they can in order to increase the appeal of their websites to the search engines.

In view of the relative ease with which link numbers can be manipulated by webmasters, there are now questions about whether leading search engines have abandoned (or are about to abandon) this simplistic, quantitative, approach to rating a website's popularity and usefulness.

So when assessing the relevance of a link, a search engine, (and they are all liable to do things differently) might take account of other factors such as:

• Context. Search engines could choose to give a lot of weight to where your link was coming from in terms of the relevance of the content of the linking website to the subject matter of your own website.
  
  So if your website is focused on organic beekeeping, for example, then a link from a site dealing in the history of the Napoleonic Wars might not carry much weight. A link from a web page which was big on the architecture of beehives, on the other hand, could be considered a good thing as both ends of the link are likely to have important keywords in common. Alternatively, such contextual relevance could be focused on the text in the immediate vicinity of or in close proximity to, your link.
  
  
• Link Text. If the inbound link contains your main keywords in the link text then this could be considered to reinforce the apparent relevance of those keywords to your website.
  
  
• Quality. As is made clear in Google's published guidelines, the inbound link should not originate in what the search engine might regard as a 'bad neighborhood' or a webpage which might be associated with 'web spamming'. What is not made so immediately clear is precisely how 'bad neighborhoods' or 'web spammers' might be easily recognised as such in every case. But, obviously, the higher a search engine rates a particular website the more importance it might attach to any links originating from it.
  
  

Search engines don't like to feel that they are being manipulated by webmasters. So a link that appears to have been placed with the sole aim of influencing them might not necessarily do you any good and in some cases could even result in your website being penalised.

The truth is that no one really seems to know with certainty how any particular search engine will regard any particular link. There is much confusion because: a) each search engine is likely to do things differently, b) search engines are liable to change the way they do things over time and, c) only the people on the inside at any particular search engine are likely to known the real truth about the way that engine operates and what importance it attaches to which types of inbound link.

So what should the poor webmaster do when trying to develop a linking strategy? Maybe the best answer is not to try to second guess the search engines. Even if you get it right today things could change next week. The safest strategy could be just to aim for links which your human visitors would find genuinely honest and useful. Google, for example, terms such genuinely useful links 'natural' links and regards them as 'votes' cast in favour of a particular website by other websites. So the more 'natural' inbound links a website receives the more 'votes' it is regarded as getting and the more useful such a website will be regarded as being to the search engine's users.

In short, look after your visitors and let the search engines look after themselves.

What did you think of this article - did you find it useful? Why not use the contact page to let me know?

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© Trevor Womack 2007