Sonet Journal

It will come as no surprise to any webmaster or SEO the amount of link exchange request we get per day at our SoNet site. Along with email that sells outsourcing in India, software builds in Transylvania, stock scams, ‘feel sorry for my pet poodle’ begging mails, and emails from the late president of Togo’s third removed cousin who has 100,000,000 hidden under his mattress and wants me to be the recipient of this paltry sum! It all amounts to a lot of spam. I now consider link exchange emails to be firmly in that field.

Every now and again I get a legitimate request for an exchange of links, when I say legitimate - I mean from a site that not only looks great but has some really useful content. Then I’ll consider it.

I received an email today from a webmaster who explained that a link exchange between his and my site would benefit us both. Curious I had a look at the site and it was the same old dross. Stuffed with keywords, had five link pages full of reciprocal links from a varying amount of professions. These guys were not even ranking for their own name, let alone their main key-phrase. I read the rest of the email and realised what the person was saying and here is an excerpt:

“I have just visited your website, and am very interested in trading links with you. We are in the process of an link building campaign to boost our page rank and get to the top for seo software development.”

What struck me about this how mistaken or misguided some of these people are, If you try and explain to them the errors they are making it is either met with a stone cold silence, a look of “well we know something that you don’t” or sheer hostility.

Having large Page Rank (PR) does not entitle you to high rankings of a website in Google. It does not work that way. We have ranked websites for competitive key-phrases on as little as PR2 then overtime as the content grew it went up in PR. Page Rank reflects the quality of backlinks to a website, it favours a website that has strong content that picks up ‘natural links’ from related content websites. The more sites that are writing about the content of your site and linking to that content then it stands a better chance in rising through the search engines.

Teflon Effect

Ranking a website naturally for a key-phrase comes through many factors and in further posts on this blog I’ll cover them. In the meantime I’ll start with page copy. There is truth in the -phrase ‘Content is King’ it has always held true and is one of the key-mantras of the WWW. Having well written content about your products or services and with the right amount of key-phrases will help in getting links. If you ask another site “would you mind linking to my well written informative website” you are more likely to get a response. You can also justify why there are incoming links to your site. No content or bad content will not give another website an excuse to link to you. Last time I wrote about this I called it the Teflon Effect. A couple of reasons for this: Links won’t stick to you if your content is lousy or you have no content. If your site is selling pots and pans and you have a thousand weak links pointing at you then you cannot justify their existence to a search engine such as Google. You can however with your Pots and Pans website create interesting and compelling content around it. A few good related articles on cooking, getting the best use of your pan, etc. Use the knowledge of your product or service to write an article. If you can’t write then hire a copywriter who can.

There are many good articles to read about linking techniques and a couple of authorities on this subject come to mind. A small and recent article for getting yourself started is Link Building Basics by Aaron Wall, LSI and Link Popularity - Andy Hagans and another good blog that I read periodically is Jim Boykin’s We Build Pages Blog that is filled with some good link tips and opinions. Check out the post Linked Out.

There is a right way and a wrong way to do everything and link building falls firmly into this statement. Do it wrong and you run the risk of screwing with your livelihood. Do it right, and the right doors will open.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006 at 9:49 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.