|
|
|
Next: Yahoo! X (Cross) Linking and Link eXchangesCross Linking is a popular technique designed to build traffic and increase PageRank. It relies on two websites agreeing to point an outbound-link to the other site. Many website owners spend a great deal of time exchanging links in this way and it is certainly a good way of initially getting yourself indexed by search engines and, if done correctly, getting some good anchor text. Be careful about unsolicited emails, these can be quite friendly and chatty saying how they have found your site and you are the ideal link partner for them. Check their site out, if they are complementary to your content it may well be worth setting up reciprocal links with them. The key is equability, the web site should offer you something, a strongly themed and relevant link page, good anchor text or PageRank. Beware of professionals who want a link from your highly ranked page and will try to give little in return by using some down and dirty trickery, more of this later. Don't link to link farms. As a general rule don't link to sites with no relevance to your own and make sure their link page is actually indexed by the search engines (check the Google and Yahoo! caches). As search engines improve their algorithms relevance and links to and from authority sites will increase in importance. You should examine the proposed link-page and home page of the site. If they have zero-page rank is this due to a ban by the search engine or is the site brand new and not yet indexed? Never link to a banned site. Finding potential link partners is not too difficult. Go to one of the major search engines and look for sites that match your target keywords or check the link partners of your competitors (use the link: operator in Yahoo!). Most of your direct competitors will probably not want to link with you (if they do then so much the better) so from the remainder see if they have good PageRank and a links page. You can now write to the webmasters of these sites asking for a reciprocal link (if there is no email address try webmaster@domain or info@domain). You'll want to write a standard letter telling them about your site and why you think you complement each other. Some people even place an outbound URL before contacting the site. In any case give the URL of your links page or the page where you propose placing the link. Remember that anchor text carries weight with the major search engines so give them the exact phrase you would like in your link. Some webmasters may refuse to link to you because you have a low or even zero PageRank as reported by the Google toolbar, don't be discouraged, point out the benefits of keyword rich anchor text from a relevant page. Cross Links and PageRankThe effect on PageRank, which is a Google concept, is more debatable. If you refer to the examples in the PageRank section you will see that the effect of adding a link to an external page boosts the PageRank of that page but dilutes PageRank available to the rest of the site.
Figure 1: PageRank on cross linked site Figure 1 is a very simple example of the effect of adding an external link. Assuming the Google toolbar is reliable (it can go a while before being updated) each PR value is worth around 8 times the previous level. Thus a link from a PR 5 page is worth 64 times that from a PR3 page. At the same time you need to divide the number of outbound-links on the page to gauge the PageRank benefit to your site. Link Campaigns and Reciprocal Link Management ToolsRunning a successful link exchange campaign takes a lot of time and organisation. There are a number of free and commercial link management tools that help to manage your reciprocal links automatically. The most common features include:
The higher end tools can be especially useful for SEOers who are managing a number of link building campaigns. Dirty Tricks of the Cross LinkersMany webmasters know that outbound-links dilute their site's PageRank. A lot of folks are so obsessed with Google's Toolbar and its PageRank display that they will do anything to avoid giving their 'PageRank' away while at the same time trying to build their own high PageRank inbound-links. As we discussed on the PageRank section, dilution is a real effect but PageRank is also a less important part of the overall Google ranking process than it was. Some webmasters disguise their outbound-links with Javascript. These look and work okay to someone checking the page. The assumption is that search engines don't read Javascript so they don't transfer PageRank or anchor text weighting.
Another trick is to re-route outbound-links via a page that has no PageRank. This is done by placing the re-routing script in a directory protected by a robots.txt file. There are some good reasons to do this, such as protecting comments from blog-spam. Google does this with outbound links from its weblog site: http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=URL The zero PageRank url script takes the target URL as a parameter and redirects the user to the page: http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://www.abcseo.com/ The robots.txt instructs search engine robots not to index the contents of the directory containing the script. Variations on this theme are to
Some webmasters are more worried about losing traffic than PageRank transfer and disguise the actual links using a single-pixel image or invisible text. These links show up when you look for backlinks in the search engine but are invisible to users. Of course the easiest trick is simply to 'forget' to put up your inbound-link or to remove it a short time later. These tactics rely on link partners assuming people are honest and not checking their inbound-links.
See Also
|
|
©1994-2006 All text and images copyright: www.abcseo.com; last updated: |
