2. If you have a web site that is getting much traffic, you will
sooner or later be approached by someone who will want
to link to your website and have a link from yours to
theirs. It has been widely reported that this will help you
get better positioning in search engines. This is and is not
true.
3. While having someone link to your site might drive traffic
if they visit your site from a link on that site, having links
that are not relevant to the content on the linked sites on
your site may actually harm your ranking on the search
engines.
4. Search engine positionint on sites like Google are based on
a point system. This system adds or subtracts points from
you for various reasons. For example it used to be that if
you hid keywords on your page repeated over and over,
you moved up in the search engines on a relevance basis.
This practice over time became known as a form of
"spamming the search engines". When you have hidden
text on your page (hidden text is when you make the text
the same color as the background so it is invisible to the
user) you lose points in the rankings and move down the
list.
5. Search engines have been made very intelligent by their
creators. They do things like compare the keywords to
content, look for content changes, and compare the
content of site links contained on the site to the sites they
link to. If the content is relevant to the site chances are it
helps your site rating. If the links are not related, it can
hurt your ranking.
6. It seems then that to have effective linking we should only
link to sites that contain complimentary content. If I have
a business site, my site should link to other sites with
business content. To link my site to a beauty salon site
would probably do very little good for me as far as traffic
is concerned and would very likely be detrimental to my
site ranking.
7. Now I do not want to deter you from having advertising on
your site. Ads are a different animal. Links usually are all
grouped together on a page of suggested links while ads
are usually mixed in with the content and take the form of
banners. These types of ads will not hurt ranking. Most
profit driven web sites have some form of ads on their site
and the search engines are made to take these ads into
consideration.
8. To sum it all up, links are good only to sites that are
relevant to your content. If someone asks you to do a link
exchange that is not relevant to your site, thank them for
the offer and decline politely. If their content is related to
yours be sure to make it happen if you have a way to do it.
9. As a web master who enjoys a top 5 listing on most search
engines on the internet I can say that when it comes to
learning how the search engines work it is better to have
linked and lost than to have never linked at all. ;-)
