Linking strategies and scams - beauty and the beast
Posted by MattE on 21 Nov 2005 at 05:06 pm | Tagged as: Web
Google’s recent Jagger update has resulted in how we view linking strategies taking on a new focus.
Link targeting
The blog world and article index is full of advise on better targeting your links, keeping them within your own site’s genre. This can be easy for some sites, but a bit obscure for some others. Take one of my sites for instance. Caricature King deals with providing excellent caricatures drawn from photos. So who to link with? (at least as far as Google is concerned).
I could quite justifiably link with the following sites:
- Photographic sites (after all they are drawn from photos)
- Art sites (it has to do with art)
- Gift sites (they can be given as gifts)
- Wedding sites (ditto gifts)
- Other caricaturists sites
- Scrapbooking sites (make an unusual scrapbook entry)
- Sports sites (get one done of your sporting team or favourite sporting star)
- Printing sites (they can be printed and look great on the wall)
Even from this short list it can be seen that potential linking partner sites can be quite diverse, though potentially legitimate in a business sense, but from a linking strategy? It provides some food for thought.
Beware Link ScamsÂ
The other aspect of linking is being aware of linking scams.
Link scam 1
Those who ask to link with you, provide their details, but never link back. These link scammers build their inbound link base on the assumption (all too often correct) that many people do not check their link partners for return links on any basis, let alone a regular basis. I have found that on average 30% of link requests fall into this category.
Alternatively, they may place the link for a short time then remove it.
Link scam 2
Another link scam is placing the return link on what I call a junk page. Often these pages are hosted on Geocities or some other fee host. The page itself looks good, but there is no other page that links to it, so all the links on that page are as good as invisible. Often these pages are touted as three way link exchanges and are designed to catch the unwary. I have found that 15% of link requests are like this.
What to do
The smart course of action is to always check that the link page is accessible from the sites home page or at minimum, one of the next level of pages. This takes some additional time, but is worth it in the long run.
To make linking easier, try some software that removes some of the work for you and many have reciprocal link checkers that can be run at the click of an icon.
Share your linking strategies, thoughts, experiences via comments
Hi,
What software is it that you recommend at techbargains ? I’m guessing it is similar to a service like Linkmetro..com ? However, that is a good service ($20.00/month first site and $10.00/mo. for second and subsequenet sites), but I did find that people you post links to and ask them to place a link to your site do not - so that’s a problem. I told the owner that most people do not link back, but he doesn’t seem concerned. Anyway, I have all these links pointing from my sites, with not that many pointing back. I may delete it from my sites, but I’m not sure of the search engine consequences of doing this.
Have a nice week.
Ken - I have no recommendations on linking software. On some of my site I use WSNlinks which has a free version and a low cost, one off paid version that has auto link checking. I think the most important aspect is to make sure that all links are within the genre of your site.