By : Nidhi Gupta

Google started it, but more and more search engines are following suit and using link popularity as an important part of their ranking algorithms. Many webmasters responded by joining link farms and stuffing their sites with as many links as possible. But all links are not created equal. In fact, bad linking strategies may get you banned from some engines.

Popularity Doesn’t Grow On Farms

A link farm consists of sites that link to other sites for the sole purpose of increasing their link popularity score. Unlike perfectly valid links to sites with related information, sites that participate in link farming contain links to totally unrelated sites. This practice is also referred to as link stuffing.

Google hates link farms and labels the links they generate as spam. In fact, Google gates them so much that some sites get removed from the index if they’re affiliated with link farms. Spooked, some webmasters are considering removing all outbound links from their sites.

That’s an overreaction that decreases the site value to visitors and hurts the Web in general because cross-linking is a basic tenet of the Internet. Links are fine - even encouraged - if they are related to your topic, but link farms rarely provide useful content to visitors.

If your site is devoted to your favorite rock band and you include links to the band members’ personal sites, other fan sites, and links to stores that sell the band’s music, that’s not a link farm. You’re providing access to other sites that will probably interest your visitors.

But if you signed up with a service that promises to generate two hundred inbound links to your site only if you agree to add two hundred outbound links in return, then you’ve planted a link farm. Instead of linking to related information of value to your visitors, you’re instead sending them to sites about herbal supplements, children’s clothes, pet rats, and other totally unrelated (possibly X-rated) topics.

Search Engines Choke On Link Stuffing

Search engines have gotten wise to these techniques and are taking a hard line against them.

AllTheWeb’s spam policy is to:

“disregard Link Stuffing when building the index and computing static rank, and to reduce the static rank of the documents containing it. “

Google warns against “artificial linkage” (translation: link farms and link stuffing) and warns that if you link to spam sites, Google’s algorithm may penalize your site.

AltaVista’s spam policy warns that sites may be deleted from the index if they “contain only links to other pages.”

Inktomi’s editorial guidelines warn against “excessively cross-linking sites to inflate a site’s apparent popularity.”

Search engines won’t penalize you for good links, but they’ve gotten pretty good at recognizing bogus ones and are quick to punish sites that try to spam them with unrelated links.

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By : Admin

Reciprocal links are one of the most common and effective forms of website promotion. When sites trade links, they both benefit by sharing some traffic directly and getting noticed more favorably by the search engines. Reciprocal Links help you improve search engine ranking and generate more traffic to your web site (The traffic that reciprocal links generate is free).

The quality and quantity of reciprocal links with other web sites allows you to increase your link popularity. Increasing your link popularity will drive more traffic to your web site as more visitors will click through to your web site and better search engine ranking will result bringing more targeted traffic.

However, if done correctly, reciprocal linking can be a powerful SEO strategy for your website. Here are some tips that will surely help you out.

• Find the right site (preferably pages that have a Google PR equal or greater to your own because the higher the Google PR the more valuable the link becomes) to do a reciprocal link exchange with.

• Exchange links only with sites that are related to your site/industry in some way. Because Sites that you’re exchanging links with need to be contextually relevant. These sites are normally in your website’s category of interest (niche), or sites that you feel your visitors might find interesting it helps you earning extra points in the eyes of Google and other major search engines.

• If you are at the beginning of promoting your site and want to see results soon, consider exchanging links with popular and quality web sites. Don’t hesitate. Lots of popular web sites that are in another category of interest, maybe accept exchange link with you.

• When you asks webmaster to link to your site and you never get a reply or your proposal gets rejected, just forget it and find another site. Never be disappointed! There are a lot of webmasters who will exchange links with you. And remember, be patient! It takes time and efforts to find and choose web sites for reciprocal links.

• Exchange as many links as you can. Don’t be afraid to swap links with competitor websites. This is not going to hurt your business. World Wide Web is a huge area. Internet has space for everyone.

• As one of the most important aspects of linking make sure that your anchor text (the text that comprises your link) contains your keywords. Doing so will signal the search engines with the specific keywords that you’re optimizing for. This enhances your search results when someone searches on your keywords or keyword phrase.

• Keep the link quantity on your website hundred or less. It should not go beyond hundred as it will ensures that search engines do not discredit the value of your site or challenge it as spam. However, you can include more than one hundred links to your website by creating a mini-link directory.

• Do not forget to check your partner’s websites on a regular basis to ensure that they are still linking back to you.

• Make sure to view the title of the links page where your link will be placed. The title tag should include keywords relevant to your site. It doesn’t have to, but if it does, the more valuable it becomes.

• Keep it in your account that Quality is always over quantity. When you being the process of building reciprocal links for your website, go for quality over quantity.

• Don’t remove your link without contacting the webmaster of the other site first.

• Prefer text links rather than graphics as this would be more search engine friendly.

• If you are serious about your website, consider getting your own domain. Your reciprocal link request is more likely to be taken seriously if you have your own domain.

The value of reciprocal links is most clearly seen over time .Once you get started, you will undoubtedly have numerous sites looking for an exchange. If the sites don’t meet your linking criteria, you must say no to the link exchange. If you sincerely follow these tips then you’re surely well on your way to a successful reciprocal linking campaign.

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By : Nidhi Gupta

Search engines are cracking down on certain types of link programs. Even if you’re an innocent member, you could find your web site penalised.

We have always said that increasing the amount of inbound links to your web site has a very positive effect on your search engine ranking and overall web traffic. This is because most search engines factor in “link popularity” when ranking your site.

Many web sites around the world over time have tried to significantly increase their inbound links by joining links programs, often referred to as link farms.

A link farm is a system where all the members are linked to each other via a common set of link pages. The result is that all members have a links page with the other members’ web addresses on them. Many of these link programs have several hundred or even thousands of members, so by joining you have almost instant access to hundreds of other web sites that point links to your site. This can lead to your site looking very “popular”.

However, search engines quite rightly decided that this kind of artificial link popularity was not a real indication of how popular a site was. In fact, most search engines consider it cheating the system, as it can turn a very ordinary site that nobody would normally visit, into a site that appears popular, but their visitors wouldn’t be interested in.

At first, the search engines decided to get around this by not only checking for the number of inbound links to a site, but the quality of the links. The more popular and relevant a site is that links to you, the better. For example, if you have a gardening site, search engines would be impressed by links to your site from, say, www.amazon.com (big site) or www.somegardeningsite.com.au (relevant site), but not so much from www.bobshomepage.com (unrelated and small, although any link is better than none).

Search engines still use this method, but now they are also penalising sites that participate in any sort of links program or link farm. They can do this by dropping your site way down their rankings, or drop your site from their database altogether. We have seen evidence of this with search engines such as Google.

The unfortunate thing about this is that innocent people can be caught out. Some people join these programs simply to get more traffic from the links (a strategy which usually doesn’t pay off too well anyway). These people will find themselves penalised anyway, even if their intention or motive wasn’t to try and fool the search engines.

The solution? The only worthwhile, long term solution to increasing your link popularity is to work on quality reciprocal links. That is, find good targetted sites to link with and contact them one by one to swap links with them. This way, you’ll benefit from quality, targetted traffic, you’ll build relationships with other businesses, and you’ll impress the search engines with your real link popularity.

Stay away from the link farms.

Get More Details At : Southwestecommerce.com

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