By now you should understand that links are very important to the popularity of a Web page or Web site. At the
simplest level, a page that does not get linked from anywhere is an "orphan" page. The search engine spider, which
crawls domains of sites and directories cannot find this page or list it, and visitors cannot find it either. The more
links a page or site has, especially links from sites and pages with high "Authority"
(high
Google Pagerank is one measure of
authority.)
The more links there are on a page to other pages, the less each link may help the authority of
those target pages, as described in the Google pagerank algorithm. Suppose a page has authority X. If a page has
20 out going links, each link may help the authority of the target page by X/20, whereas if it has 40 outgoing links,
each link may help by only X/40
There are three sorts of links: Inbound Links (backlinks) from other Web sites, Outbound Links and Internal Links.
All of them are important in different ways for the ranking of your Web page and Web site.
Backlinks (Inbound Links) from other sites are most important - the more such links to your site from reputable
Web sites the better. Inbound links have two effects. They raise the authority (Pagerank in Google) of the Web site or
Web page and, if they use the keyword of that page or site in their hypertext, they raise the "rank" of that page for
that keyword.
Links from your own "support" Web sites and Web logs to a target site have the same effect on the target site of
course, provided that the "support" site or Blog has a different domain and is hosted on a different server from the
target site. Otherwise they are just internal links. Links from sites that are in no way related to your Web page can
supposedly harm the standing of that page.
Outbound Links - Outbound links can help your Web page or site in search engine placement if they are related to
your topic. Links to other pages that discuss Widgets and use the keyword Widget in their hypertext can help improve the
search engine "rank" of that page for keyword widget. It is not known whether or not a page can be targeted maliciously
to "detune" it from a keyword by linking to it with other words. Example- Your competitor's Widget web site is
retrieved in first place for keyword Widget by Google. You put up 10,000 links to that page with keyword Defective
Junk in the hypertext. Will that affect the ranking of your competitor for keyword Widget?
A page may have a
given amount of Web "authority" that can be distributed among all of the outgoing links from that page.
Internal Links - Internal links are much more important than you might think in optimizing Web pages and Web
sites. All links should be full path links - as in
The text link to the main page should not say "Home" in the Metatag unless you are selling
homes at your Web site. Tell the search engine what the site is about - over and over. Each page of your site should
also have full path links to important pages within the site, using full path links.
The importance of repeating links within your Web site is not known, though they do carry some weight. They do not do
any harm. In my experience, repeating links help a great deal in propelling pages to the top of search engine listings.
They can be sidebar links, or better, links in context to words that are discussed in the text.
Of course, you cannot link to every page of your Web site from every page. All pages may have a few repeating links
in the side bar or at the bottom. Pages within a section may have repeating links to other pages within that section,
which are also helpful to visitors for navigation.
Google Bombing - "Google Bombing" illustrates the power of links and shows you how to use them. Google bombing is
a technique for raising the popularity of a Web page by linking to it with a key phrase from many other pages and Web
sites. For example, suppose you don't like a certain politician. You create a page with the name of that politicians and
a few thousand links to that page with the words "Complete Idiot" in the link text ("hypertext"). Pretty soon, whenever
someone types Complete Idiot in Google, your page with the name of that politician will be retrieved first by
Google. It is not certain to what extent this works for other search engines. Google is now looking out for Google
Bombing in specific categories and has quite specific signals that trip off their algorithms to filter out such tricks.
This led at least one person to claim that Google ignores link anchor text (the text used in the link
or "hypertext") entirely. That is certainly false.
Link popularity - There is a belief or "superstition" that Google and other search engines use information about
how often a link is clicked in their results page to determine the popularity of that link. That may be so. However,
before you tell all your friends to click the link to your Web page in Google results pages, remember that really
popular pages get tens of thousands of clicks a week, so you had better have a great many friends if you want to
increase popularity of your pages that way.
Link Exchanges - a number of sites offer free or paid link exchange services. Please note that
these listings are not recommendations:
http://www.linkmarket.net/
http://www.linksjunk.com/
http://www.linkdiary.com/
www.linkexchanged.com/
www.gotlinks.com/
The quality of the reciprocating pages may not be all that it should be. Sites that have to fish
for links are probably not those with pagerank 6 or higher.
