reciprocal link partners
Many people question the importance of finding reciprocal
link partners. Basically, there are two reasons to exchange links with
someone: to get direct click thru links from their site to yours when
people visit the link partner site. The other, more robust reason is to
gain Link Popularity. Consider Link Popularity to be like a vote for your
site – the more respectable web sites that link to you, the more
likely your rankings will improve on Google and other major search engines.
If you're looking to get click throughs from a given
website, you need to ask a few questions:
- Is this a high traffic web site? Will web surfers
(not other web masters) actually find and click thru my link or banner?
- Is this web site appealing and interesting enough
for a site visitor to be inclined to stay for any length of time before
going back to their favorite search engine (Google, MSN, Yahoo) to find
another website that meets their needs?
- How organized are the link pages on this website?
Will people find my link or banner easily, or will it be buried 50 levels
deep or lost on a banner farm with 100 other banners?
- Does my link or banner look interesting in the
context of other links or banners on the page such that someone would
be more inclined to click thru to my site than another website?
If the site passes the above reciprocal link partner
test, then by all means swap links with them, or buy ad banner space,
as it will most likely help your cause. You needn’t be concerned
with how your link looks beyond what human visitors see. However, if you’re
looking to get search engine placement on Google or other search engines/directories
that count link popularity as part of their algorithm, the best link partner
site will have various qualities and lack others:
- Search engines sometimes penalize or ban free-for-all
link exchange sites, especially when driven by automated links software
(try Googling for searchking ban). The best way to swap links is by
hand verifying your link exchange partner sites.
- Although search technology is improving, Google
and other search engines prefer pure html links like http://www.orthographics.com
over redirected links like http://www.site.com/page.cgi?redirect=12345
- clean HTML links will count as votes for your site.
<<more at top of page>> |
|
best link partner - continued
- Make sure that the page your link will be listed
on appears on Google. A quick test is to try Googling for allinurl:www.site.com/links.html
or whatever the name of the links page is. If it comes up, then it will
probably help your results. If it does not show in the directory, then
there are several possible reasons to consider:
- it’s a new page or website.
- the site is penalized for spam, major cross linking with other web
sites, or for being a link farm or other computer generated, template
driven web site.
- the crafty webmaster is a cheat and does things to get you to link
to him with pure HTML while your reciprocal link is:
-- a redirected link or Java Script link.
-- the links page is not actually linked to by the main part of the
web site.
-- the page has <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow">
in the header, meaning that search engines are not supposed to crawl
the page.
-- the robots.txt file on the site tells Google not to crawl the links
page. Type http://www.site.com/robots.txt into the address bar. If a
text file comes up, look for a line that reads disallow: /links-page-or-directory
where the part after the slash is the directory the links page is in,
or the links page itself. Note that many responsible web masters will
use robots.txt to prevent crawling of certain pages like order forms
or other areas that should not be in any search engine index.
- You could check page rank (PR) using the Google
Toolbar too, but from lots of recent events it looks like it's of much
less importance than it used to be. A high PR links page is a good sign
when exchanging links, however, with recent events, it is not recommended
to avoid linking with someone simply because the links page has no toolbar
rank. Instinct and the allinurl search tool mentioned above will provide
a better gauge.
Orthographics.com is always looking for the best link
partners, so please find a category that suits your webste in our section if you have a quality web site to exchange links
with.
website builder links
- Find more website builder tools available for free from
Orthographics and other quality websites.
website design builder home
- Go back to the Orthographics Website homepage to find
more web site builder design tools.
|