Dreamscape Solutions News Blog
Bringing you up-to-the-minute reports from the eventful calendar at DreamscapeMonday, October 08, 2007
You gotta have links to get links
Anyone who's been around the web design industry for a while has seen many trends in linking come and go. First there were link farms, then link exchanges, forum spam, blog comment spam, links bought and sold based on PageRank, mass production of online press releases and linkbait articles, and now leveraging of social networking.
SEO professionals spend large parts of their work life arguing about whether links have to be topical to bring benefit, whether bought links will be found and filtered by search engines or if linking out is going to lose a site its PageRank and hence its place in the search results. This all misses the point of linking in the first place - to tell users about other sites on the internet they should visit. The end result of this is a lot of bad advice floating around on the internet for small business owners about what they should or should not do when they first set up a web site, or discover the art of search engine optimisation.
Search engines originally trusted links as a means for determining the quality of a site because people tended to recommend other sites they liked. On this very simple basis the idea works incredibly well. You wouldn't send a friend or a customer to a site they wouldn't like, would you? Because a link from one good site to another good site is, inherently, a reliable recommendation, should you ever turn down that link simply because the referring site happens to sell products in a different industry? If you have a new site, and you need people to know about it, and you have a friend or a business partner with a website, why wouldn't you ask them to link to you. Even if this link is ignored by search engines, it could still bring traffic to your website.
SEO professionals spend large parts of their work life arguing about whether links have to be topical to bring benefit, whether bought links will be found and filtered by search engines or if linking out is going to lose a site its PageRank and hence its place in the search results. This all misses the point of linking in the first place - to tell users about other sites on the internet they should visit. The end result of this is a lot of bad advice floating around on the internet for small business owners about what they should or should not do when they first set up a web site, or discover the art of search engine optimisation.
Search engines originally trusted links as a means for determining the quality of a site because people tended to recommend other sites they liked. On this very simple basis the idea works incredibly well. You wouldn't send a friend or a customer to a site they wouldn't like, would you? Because a link from one good site to another good site is, inherently, a reliable recommendation, should you ever turn down that link simply because the referring site happens to sell products in a different industry? If you have a new site, and you need people to know about it, and you have a friend or a business partner with a website, why wouldn't you ask them to link to you. Even if this link is ignored by search engines, it could still bring traffic to your website.
Labels: link building, website promotion
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