Social Interaction and Links
Where to Get Links
- Create content or ideas which important people can identify with and would likely link at.
- Directories may link to sites you submit.
- You can exchange links with similar web sites. If you can afford to, it is better to create legitimate business partnerships and friendships rather than just exchange links with whoever is willing.
- Writing articles about your topic and placing them on other web sites can give you inbound links via the article signature. If you submit articles to other sites, you may want to create unique content just for the article submission sites or have a longer or different version of the article on your site so that you are not fighting against duplicate content issues when others syndicate your articles.
- Writing press releases can give you inbound links.
- You can participate in forums which provide signature links. If you participate in communities and leave relevant, useful comments then eventually people may want to link to you if they start to like you.
- Buy links or rent advertising space.
- Donate to charities for links.
- People interested in your site may eventually link to you without you asking.
Generally, this is where SEO battles are either won or lost in competitive markets.
Generally, the easier and cheaper the link is to get, the less a search engine will want to trust it. Getting other people to want to talk about you or your business (and link to you) is the golden egg of SEO.
Search engines want to count legitimate editorial citations. They would prefer not to count other types of links as votes. Some engines, such as Google, have advanced algorithms to find and discount many artificial links.
How often do Search Engines Crawl?
Search engines constantly crawl the web. Pages that frequently update with strong link popularity may get crawled many times each day. Pages that do not change that often, are associated with spammy sections of the web, and/or have little link popularity may get crawled only once or twice a month.
Sites like CNN are crawled hundreds or thousands of times each day. Since search engines are constantly adding content to their index, they are in a constant state of flux.
How Search Engines Evaluate Links
Through the 'eyes' of a search engine, you usually cannot control who links to you, but you can control who you link to. In most cases, if bad sites link to you, it does not hurt you. If you link back, it does. So in essence, it usually does not hurt you to get inbound links. You should be rather selective with who you are willing to link out to though.
Start With Trust
Some search algorithms may look at the good link to bad link ratio as well. If your site has few well-trusted links and many low quality ones, they may filter out your site if they suspect it of overt ranking manipulation.
When you get quality links, you are not only getting the boost those links may give you, but you are also lowering your risk profile and naturalizing your link profile.
Some links are a sure sign of quality. For example, if you are listed in the Yahoo! Directory search engines know that at some point in time an editor working at a search company reviewed your website.
If you are trying to replicate the success of a competing site it is important to start by trying to get a number of higher quality links before getting too many low quality links.
If you are unsure if something is a quality link or not, ask yourself if you were a search engineer would you want to trust that link. If the answer is "yes,�? then it is a quality link. It is still ok to get some low quality links as automated scraper sites and other junk sites give most all well-ranked sites a bunch of low quality links, but the key to doing well long term is to try to create a reason why people would want to give you quality links.
Blogs and Weblog Comment Spam
It is recommended to view the web as a social medium. Find blogs with posts about topics you are interested in and participate in the community. The whole point of weblogs is community discussion, so it is not spam to add something useful and link to your web site from it.
Don't expect the link to help you rank better in the search engines, but if you participate in your community and leave useful comments, it will make some people more likely to link to your site or pay attention to you.
An even better way to get noticed with blogs is to comment about what other blogs say on your own blog
Rel="NoFollow"
Many major search engines and blog software vendors came together to make a link 'nofollow' attribute. The 'nofollow' tag allows people to leave static links in the comments of blogs which search engines may not count for relevancy.
Essentially, the tag is designed to be used when allowing others to post unverified links into your site. It is a way of saying, "I did not provide an editorial vote for the other page."
You also can use it if you are linking out to shady stuff as an example, but do not want to parse any link credit to the destination URL.
Many webmasters will likely be a bit sneaky and create fake blogs and then spam their own blog with links off to high margin web site affiliate programs.
The 'nofollow' feature looks as follows:
<a href="http://www.blablabla123.com" rel="nofollow">Link Text</a>
Therel="nofollow" tag may also make it easier for many webmasters to cheat out reciprocal link partners. I am a big believer in karma though and doing things like that will likely come back to hurt you.
Also think of the 'nofollow' tag as if you were a search engineer. If a site was full of nothing but unverified links, would you trust that site as much as a site that had some trusted editorial links to other sites? I wouldn't.
Search engineers, such as Google's Matt Cutts, are trying to push webmasters to use 'nofollow' on ads sold on their sites. Unless the use of 'nofollow' is built into your content management system, I would not recommend using 'nofollow'. Using it is a way to define your site as an SEO site which may be trying to manipulate Google's index.
Chat, Google Groups & Forums
In forums, people asking and answering questions creates free content for the person who owns the site. This automated content creation allows the forum owner to sell advertising space against the work of others.
In exchange for the posts, many SEO forums allow signature links that point to your web site. Since forums change rapidly, they often get indexed frequently. This will help your site get indexed quickly if you ask a few questions at a few of the various SEO forums.
Of course, the goal of forums is to have meaningful conversations, but if you are reading this e-book, odds are that you may still have some SEO questions.
Forum links are easy to get and forums have many links on the pages though, so the links probably do not have a large effect on SEO. Forum sig links from relevant. useful posts have far more direct value in driving sales and building friendships than in effecting search results directly.
By helping others by participating in web communities, you become more linkworthy and work your name and your brand into the language representative of your topic. Plus if you know what people in your community are talking about it is much easier to create things they would be interested in and market them to their needs and wants.
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