External Linking Back to Article Incoming links from other websites are becoming more and more important to the value that search engines assign to your pages in the search index; they are viewed as "votes" for your site. There are three types of incoming links; reciprocal, non-reciprocal and link farms. Be aware that page rank of the sites linking to you directly corresponds with the perceived value of your site content for Google especially; you can get more information about page ranks and their value at http://www.google.com/technology/. When an external website links to your site and you provide a link back to them, this is called reciprocal linking. If the websites contain relevant content or complimentary topics, more weight is given to them than sites with no correlation between them. Also, the higher the perceived page rank of the site linking to you the better your content will appear to the search engines. When an external website links to your site and you do not provide a link back to them, this is called non-reciprocal linking. This is the most valuable type of link; it indicates to the search engines that the site linking to you saw your site as such a valuable resource or authority on a specific topic that they didn't require a link back to them. Once again, the higher the perceived page rank of the site linking to you the better your content will appear to the search engines. The third type incoming links are link farms. You want to stay as far away from these types of links as possible. A link farm is a website whose sole purpose is to artificially raise page ranks of the participating sites by providing links to them while offering no real use or content of its own to visitors. They usually consist of thousands of links to various sites that have no relevant content to your site, and they all link back to the link farm to artificially guide spiders and bots to the other sites. Search engines frown upon the use of link farms and in some cases will penalize your search index ranking and sometimes your page rank will suffer for participating in this practice. A good rule of thumb is to stay in "good neighborhoods" with reciprocal and non-reciprocal links to sites with good page ranks and stay away from "bad neighborhoods" like link farms and sites with bad page ranks. Outgoing links are important as well, although search engines do not give them as much weight as incoming links. It is perceived that you are providing a service to your users by providing links to relevant content on other sites. If you do provide non-reciprocal outgoing links, be sure that any site you are linking to has a Google page rank of 4 or above as this will indicate to search engines that you are linking to worthwhile content. |
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