ClearView Writing

Link building is a technique employed by many webmasters to promote their website, increase search engine visibility and increase their Google Page Rank (PR).  Link building definitely contains a huge amount of benefits, but it does come with some draw backs that the unwary should keep an eye out for!

But first things first, if you are new to link building there are several different kinds of links that you should be looking to obtain!  Be warned though, Google has been known to blacklist websites that buy or sell links!

One Way Links - One way links are the most valuable kind of link you can gain, especially if they are organic (Not paid for) and generated solely by people interested in your content.

One way links can also be bought and sold on sites such as the Digital Sales Forum or Digital Point!

Reciprocal Linking - Reciprocal links are usually formed with link exchanges between sites of similar page rank.  Sometimes you may pay a subsidy to form a reciprocal link with a site that his a higher PR.

Three Way Linking (a, b, c linking) - Google has cottoned on to reciprocal linking, for this reason sites with large amounts of reciprocal, or suspected purchased links, may be penalized  This is where three way, or a-b-c linking comes into play.

This kind of linking creates a link network between three different sites, usually between two owners.

Say for instance Owner 1 has two websites, a and c.  Owner 2 has one website, site b.

Owner 1 could link site a to site b, in return Owner 2 would in return link site b to site c.

Four Way Linking - This is similar to Three Way linking except it can be much more complex.  Four way linking can provide a wide selection of one way links to each of the fours sites!

Link Networks - In some situations you may partner with another webmaster with a network of sites similar to your own.  With these kinds of link partners you could have a near unlimited number of link partners.

You can get some websites which arrange these link networks, many of these have now been black listed by Google though!

The other downside to participating in these networks is the complexity and organisation required to keep everything up to date.

Choose your Link Building Partners Carefully.

When you first start link building you may get stung a few times by people scoring free links off people.  Unfortunately this never stops but you may become a little better at spotting the fraudsters from the legit link traders.

There are three techniques that fraudsters regularly use to scam links off you

The first, simpler to spot scam is when people put your link up, put a link up to you, then after  a week or two delete your link.  This can be avoided by some kinds of Link Management Software

The second, harder to spot scammers technique is where you are offered a three way link exchange.  You will be offered a high pr link in exchange for you lining to a lower PR site.

The high PR site generally has been bought or stolen however, and you will often find the pr dropping to PR0 within weeks.  These deals often sound too good to be true, and often are just that.

The third and final scam is a simple one to spot, but often overlooked.  Always check the source code of a site you have made a link exchange with.  Ensure that the link does not have the nofollow attribute attached to it.  If the link has nofollow then you will not receive the PR benefit from this link!

Site Value & Outgoing Links

When you are looking for link partners you have to remember that links from some sites have a ‘lower’ value than others in Google’s algorithm.  Also remember that to increase your own page rank you should be looking to link with sites that have a greater PR than your own!

The two factors used in Google’s algorithm to determine page rank are Site Value and Outgoing Links.  Outgoing links is rather self explanatory.  The more outgoing links there are, the less PR you will get from the link to your site.  Be warned this can go into the negatives, at which point it will adversely effect your page rank!

Site quality is much more complex, but spam content, duplicate content and poor English content will lower this score.  While this will not go into the negatives a poor quality PR8 link could be worth a tenth of a PR1 link.

For this reason you must closely investigate both these factors of any website you are preparing to link with to ensure you are getting value for the trade.

Social Bookmarking Links

Social Bookmarking can be a great way to improve traffic over a short period.  Unfortunately the traffic is generally poor quality and gives low conversions. The links from social bookmarking sites are also, for the most part, no follow.  This means you get no PR from these sites

Promoting social bookmarking on your site is, despite my outlook, not a bad thing.  While it takes time to do it yourself if you can get your visitors to do the bookmarking for you it can create a steady flow of free organic traffic to your site.  This will increase your income and site value, if only by a small amount.

You do also get, on occasions, what has become known as the Digg effect.

The Digg effect can increase visitors to your website a thousand-fold.  It basically occurs when one of your stories hits the front page of a major social networking site.  This instantly gives you an insane amount of traffic.

The pro’s of this are more traffic, profits and exposure.

The downside is if your server cannot handle the traffic, or your provider limits you, then your account may be suspended for a day for breaking the fair usage policy.

The Difference Between Do Follow and No Follow

In any link you create you can add a tag to the HTML called ‘ref’.  This attribute is an integral part of link creation, and there are a wide range of values that can be attached to this attribute.

Most of them however hold no interest to us, except that is, no follow.  Just to clarify, a Do Follow link would be a link with no ‘rel’ attribute

No Follow basically means that Google will not pay attention to the link.  This means that your site will not get PR for the link and Google will not crawl your pages through the link. For this reason No Follow links are of significantly lower value than do-follow links, and rarely used by webmasters other than in comments sections on their websites.

Putting your Link on Do Follow Forums and Blogs

Putting your link on do follow forums, or even on comments in do follow blogs, can be a great free way to increase your own websites PR.

Do follow blogs and forums exist in nearly every niche on the internet, remember to check for quality however, as many of these are spammed to hell, have a 0PR themselves and have next to no quality material on them!