The Importance of Links

Links between websites and between web pages are a fundamental part of the web. In fact linking between web sites/pages is what make the web a web.

Links and Search Engines

As part of it their ranking algorithm search engines place great emphasis on links and achieving a high ranking in SERPS on the major search engines for competitive keywords isn’t possible without links.

One of the most famous illustrations of the importance of links in search engine rankings is the White house biography page of the US president George Bush.

or the Adobe reader

You wont find the words “failure” or “Click here” anywhere on the respective pages but they still are number 1 on Google for those search times and have been for years. Not only that but Yahoo results are almost identical.

Note: Google appear to have remedied the Bush Bomb but the adobe one still works. Not only that but Yahoo and Windows live still rate George Bush highly for “miserable failure”– May 2007

The importance of links to Google led to the term and practise of “Google bombing”. Defined by Wordspy.com as:Setting up a large number of web pages with links that point to a specific web site so that the site appears at the top of the Google search results when someone searches for those words.(see links under resources at bottom of page for more background)

Link Types

Not all links are of equal importance. There are three types of links that you will encounter.

One-Way Inbound Links

The best type of links to get are simple inbound links. These are obtained by other website owners linking to you because you are considered an authority in a particular filed, or the article/web page is particularly relevant. These type of links will come if you produce high quality content web pages, but they come slowly.

The other way of getting simple inbound links is from directories. Most, but not all, directories will list your website without requiring you to link to them. The search engine and directory links page has a list of some directories that you may want to list with.

Reciprocal Links

When I first started on the Net the most popular linking strategy involved seeking and requesting a link exchange with other sites. You link to a website and in return they will link back to you. This type of link is a reciprocal link.

It is difficult to say whether link reciprocal exchange as a search engine optimisation strategy is dead. It is however fair to say that Google, in particular, have changed their search algorithm such that reciprocal links appear to be heavily discounted (not much weight attached).

Google obviously saw this type of link building strategy as unnatural ( it was). As a work around many link exchange request propose a three way linking structure to try too fool the search engines that they are natural links. It is likely that this strategy itself will become obsolete.

It is for this reason that I don’t offer any link exchange type service to clients. That doesn’t mean that they don’t work but the effects may only be temporary.

However that doesn’t mean that you should never request a link from another site. If you do that link should add value to your visitor and you should place it on your site irrespective of whether you get a link back.

There is strong evidence that Google actually rewards sites that link out to so called “authority sites”. So don’t be afraid of linking out but only link to relevant quality sites.

Incoming Links as a Traffic Source

Good incoming links are also a very important source of traffic. You may even find that some links bring more traffic than the search engines. In addition, the traffic provided by links is generally consistent and not subject to the vagaries of your search engine ranking.