Website Links -
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Website Links - A Quick Guide

Website Links
The links to and from your website are very important any links must be relevant to your websites content. In the early days of the internet the major search engines simply counted the inbound links to a particular page and if it had a lot of links they determined it must be an important page, however all this has changed.  Firstly I will describe bad links and then the good links.

Bad Links
Because of the importance of inbound links some companies started selling links ( and indeed still do ) these companies became known as link farms, this is the term used for companies where you would pay money and the company would provide you with links from its members and you would give some outbound links to other members. The search engines had to quickly come up with ways of detecting the buying and selling of links as this distorted the search results.

A poor low quality website who bought dozen's of links, all of a sudden started featuring highly in the search results, so the major search engines added algorithms to detect links to and from link farms, and their members. The major search engines continually work on this main area which causes them  problems when trying to return high quality relevant links to the search results.

The link farms days are numbered and nowadays you are much more likely to be penalised rather than to benefit from any of these linking farms.

Beware companies still try to sell links, I had a call from a company only this week telling of the wonderful things they could do for my websites. Don't even think about it! You will get dropped by all the major search engines as they are all working hard to eradicate this dubious practise.

Good links
Good links are relevant links so if you sell fruit and vegetables and the association of fruit and veg website links to you then that's a very good link! If it's your friend who has a garage down the road who links to you then that's an irrelevant link and the search engine know the difference!

Good links are also text links within your website so for instance on this page when I mention domain names I will link to the page within my website that concerns domain names, this is good because visitors can follow that link to find subjects they are interested in and also the search engines count how may internal links you have to each page, after all if you can't be bothered to link to your own pages then why should they bother.

Search engines count internal links to determine the importance you put on a page within your website for instance if one page is linked to fifty times throughout your site in a relevant manor and another page only has one link then the search engine determines that the page with one link is not very important.

The key to getting a good ranking in Google and Yahoo is not link quantity, but link quality. A small number of relevant, high-quality links can have a very positive effect on a web pages page's rankings. The most effective links are built by creating good content and networking with other related businesses.

A good way to get inbound links is to go after some free authoritative links. What's important is that you determine which pages on your website are important to you, for instance providing you with an income, and point quality links at those web pages so they get a better page ranking.

Google, MSN and Yahoo are not any longer interested in having the biggest website index-now they're focused on having the best high quality index, and that means they're dropping a lot of low value web pages from their huge databases of billions of pages. That also means that even the sites with many inbound quality links can expect to have some poor quality pages dropped. If you've got a large site, expecting all the pages to feature highly in the search engines is usually unrealistic.

More about links will be added later, if you have any questions please use the " ask a question" links.