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Suicide in Cyberspace - Your Outward Links Can Kill Your Rankings
By Ben Kemp (c) 2007

Link building strategies have, for most people for a long time,
revolved around reciprocal link exchanges. Whilst most people
understand that links are important, they generally don't
understand why this is so. In a nutshell, a link to your site
has traditionally been accepted by Search Engines as a vote for
your site. A link from a topic or theme-related site to yours is
better than a link from a site having a completely different
topic. An important site's link to yours carries more weight -
for example from The Open Directory, or Yahoo Directory. All
pretty straightforward...

BUT... the rules have changed... significantly! All the thinking
webmasters worked diligently to build links - willy-nilly - in
order to subvert the search engine rankings and gain an
advantage to themselves at the expense of everyone else. For a
long time, there have been mutterings about this, and comments
from Google staffers about possible penalties from linking to
"bad neighbourhoods'" and - heaven forbid it - buying links!
Google et al simply don't approve of willy-nilly link-building
schemes, and have recently tightened the screws a bit more, in
two notable ways...

Bad Links

Some links are bad... for example, if you are a car
sales company and you've got dozens of completely irrelevant
links to international hotel sites... yeah, YOU know the ones!
in Prague, Munich, Shanghai etc! That's a BAD neighbourhood over
there! That IS going to put a world of hurt on you! And as for
the Free For All link sites, web rings, and 3 way link
schemes... that's just suicide in cyberspace! Why? Coz its a
blatant and completely indefensible attempt at cheating the
system!

Reciprocal Links - Almost a Waste of Effort

Reciprocal links are still of some value, providing the link
titles are explicit, and if the page they link to you from has a
higher Page Rank than the page from which you link to them. The
concept of a link to you being a vote for you, and being added
to your site's Total Vote Count has a flip side. A link from you
to someone else essentially deducts one vote from your total
vote count... meaning its value is minimal when compared to a
1-way incoming back-link!

1-Way Outward Links Are Toxic

Ok, lets assume you are a service provider, maybe a health
clinic, and you deal with hospitals, other doctors, specialists,
nurses, laboratories. So, as a benefit to your visitors, you
place direct links to their web resources on your links page. Is
that clever?

Most certainly it is NOT! Transfusion time, because you'll be
haemorrhaging Page Rank with nothing in return! Do it, but be
smart about it, because there is NOTHING to be gained (by you)
from linking to any site that does not link back. So make sure
your links include the "nofollow" attribute that tells SE's that
the link is NOT a vote by your site for that site!

Link Content Is Mission Critical

This is mission critical because Google and others have decided
that they can't trust you to be honest about your site!
Basically, it seems like there are two web tribes - those who
know not so much about how things work, and those who know more
than they should. There should also be a flourishing third
tribe, who just build great sites with lots of terrific content
that automatically ranks highly - but nobody's seen nuthin' from
those guys for ages!

The tribe who know more than they should ruthlessly manipulate
every available loophole to dominate search engine rankings, at
the expense of those who have yet to read SEO For Dummies.
Therefore, Google decided that its essential that there is some
external correlation between what YOU say your site is about,
and what OTHER people say your site is about... This is done by
analysing the words in the Link Title on all links pointing to
your site. Bottom line here is - if a keyword phrase does NOT
appear on links to your site, you ain't gonna rank for that
phrase!

For many established sites, this is the main reason they might
have experienced a noticeable decline in rankings in the last
few months. Most older sites will have a majority of incoming
links based on their business name, and NOT on their activities
/ products / services / location etc. To use the common
"widgets" analogy - if you are selling "widgets" and all your
incoming link Titles have only your business name e.g. Smiths
Manufacturing Co Ltd, it's now very difficult for you to rank
for "widgets"!

Backlink analysis reveals this shortcoming rather quickly and,
lucky for you, it is possible to remedy this by building 1-way
incoming back-links using multiple Title / Description
combinations that contain a good spread of relevant keywords. It
does require some keyword research, and it is tedious - but if
you don't do it, you are certainly not going forwards! But your
competitors might be...
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Ben Kemp is a free-lance search engine optimisation
(http://www.comauth.co.nz/seo-rates-services.htm) consultant and
web designer. He offers free SEO articles & web design tips, see
The SEO Guys Blog (http://www.comauth.co.nz/the-seo-guys-blog/)

Web: http://www.comauth.co.nz
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