Tweet

Suicide in Cyberspace - Your Outward Links Can Kill Your Rankings

Written by: Ben Kemp

Article Overview: Link building strategies have, for most people for a long time, revolved around reciprocal link exchanges. But the rules have changed significantly and some types of links are bad - and they are going to put a world of hurt on your rankings!

Suicide in Cyberspace - Your Outward Links Can Kill Your Rankings

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 forbids 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 a 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 healthclinic, and you deal with hospitals, other doctors, specialists, nurses, laboratories. So, as a benefit to your visitors, you place direct links to their web resourceson your links page.

Is that clever? Most certainly it is NOT! Transfusion time, because you'll be haemorrhaging Page Rankwith 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 other 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 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 phrases 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 your only business name e.g. Smiths Manufacturing Co Ltd, its 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...

Related Articles
  Don’t Let Dead Links Kill Your Website
  Suicidal Ideations
  Link Building Methods Types of Links
  Methods To Use To Easily Achieve Higher Search Engine Ranking
  Transferring an Existing Domain Name

Article Tags: links, reciprocal link exchanges



Related Forum Posts
Re: YOU CANNOT AND SHOULD NOT DO IT ALONE - You're very welcome . . . Happy New Year!!! Today, now that we know that the world is truly "flat" and that we are only a few clicks away from anyone the idea of being "alone" should be a thing of the past. I'm your new friend and so is everyone else on this forum. There are so many ways to make friends and find advisors. People want to help each other. You will never be alone again . . . .You are part of the Cyberspace Community. If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself. ~Henry Ford Best wishes forever and a lifetime
Re: How can I promote my site? - There are various useful techniques for promoting a website. In SEO the techniques could be "white hat" and "black hat" techniques. White hat techniques includes following techniques to promote website as per the search engine rules. - Search Engine Friendly Tags - Website submission to Search Engines - Website Submission to Social Sites (Like twitter, Facebook) - Articles Promotion & Press Release Promotion - Quality Directories promotion - Contribution to Blogs, Forums Black hat techniques can reduce website strength in the search engine and can treat site as spam that could be following. - Keywords Stuffing. - Hidden Links - Maximum Links of unknown sites.
Re: Alexa Ranking Goals - Thanks for posting the Alexa Rankings again Evan. Well done Mal that is a tremendous improvement, just keep on doing what you have been doing but really don't worry too much about the AR, it just nice as a way to keep us on track. David I had the same problem with Alexa and Google, who knows why they do what they do either we are in favor or not but I just keep on and hope for the best. MichelleJ
Re: Bad SEO techniques? - There are few more techniques which also known as the Bad SEO Techniques or Black Hat SEO Techniques. Such as: - Relying on keyword metatags - Purchase Links (From Spamming or blacklisted sites or doing purchase links on high level for site marketing) - Horde Page Rank: This is one of my favorites, because it's one that most webmasters don't understand yet. This is because it changed over the past year or two. The concept people have in their mind is that page rank is a key part of site rankings and linking to other sites "leaks page rank" from your site. However, the world has changed. - Swap Links: Another oldie, but not goodie. Search engines want links to represent endorsements. Swapped links represent barter, and they are trivial to detect. Don't swap links for the purpose of building page rank. It's a waste of your time - Implement duplicate content - Use Session IDs on your URLs - Use lots of Javascript - Implement your site in Flash
Re: Bad SEO techniques? - [quote="WebBizIdeas.com":1jr37kqx]There are few more techniques which also known as the Bad SEO Techniques or Black Hat SEO Techniques. Such as: - Relying on keyword metatags - Purchase Links (From Spamming or blacklisted sites or doing purchase links on high level for site marketing) - Horde Page Rank: This is one of my favorites, because it's one that most webmasters don't understand yet. This is because it changed over the past year or two. The concept people have in their mind is that page rank is a key part of site rankings and linking to other sites "leaks page rank" from your site. However, the world has changed. - Swap Links: Another oldie, but not goodie. Search engines want links to represent endorsements. Swapped links represent barter, and they are trivial to detect. Don't swap links for the purpose of building page rank. It's a waste of your time - Implement duplicate content - Use Session IDs on your URLs - Use lots of Javascript - Implement your site in Flash[/quote:1jr37kqx] Hi Jeff, Thanks for adding to the list. I have one question, though. How would one implement Session IDs for a URL, and what benefit would come from doing so?


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Time management for DIY PR

Sales Training – Top Salespeople Are Not Dunces

Promoting your company and self with verve

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.