Incoming links are one of the most important factors for high search engine rankings. If your website doesn't have enough incoming links then it's very difficult to get high rankings for a competitive search term.

It's important that you get the right kind of links. If you have 20 good incoming links then you'll get better rankings than with 100 bad incoming links.

So what makes a good incoming link? There are several points that can make a link better than other links:

1. The link should use the keyword in the anchor text

If you want to get high rankings for a search term like "buy brown shoes" then the links to your website should use exactly that text. The text that is used to link to your site ( the "anchor text" ) influences the words for which your website will get high rankings. Make sure that the texts that are used to link to your website contain words for which you want to get high rankings on search engines.

2. The link should be from a relevant page

Links from related web pages usually work better than links from unrelated pages. Links from unrelated pages won't hurt your rankings but Google likes links from websites that are related to yours better.

3. The link should go to a relevant page on your site

While it's okay to get links to your home page it is better to get links to the page that is most relevant to the chosen anchor text. If the link text is "buy brown shoes" then you should make sure that the link goes to a page that deals with brown shoes. If the link text matches the content of the linked pages then it's more likely that your web page is really relevant to that term and it's more likely that you'll get high rankings for that search term. In addition, you increase the user experience. If a surfer clicks on a "buy brown shoes" link it's much more likely that he'll buy on your site if he gets the correct page.

4. It's good if the link is from an authority site

Links from pages with high authority will help to increase the TrustRank of your website. Links from websites with high PageRank have a positive effect on the rankings of your own site. Unfortunately, the Google PageRank that is displayed in the green bar in Google's toolbar is not the PageRank that Google uses for its ranking algorithm. The PageRank displayed in the toolbar is outdated, often wrong and more a gimmick than a real help. You'll often find websites with low PageRank that rank higher than pages with high PageRank in the search results.

Don't trust the green pixels and use common sense. If a website is well known and if the site has good search engine rankings then it's likely that it is also an authority website.

5. The link must not have a nofollow attribute

The nofollow attribute tells search engines that they should not follow a link. Links with that attribute don't help your search engine rankings. Unfortunately, you have to check the HTML code of your link partners to find out if they use a nofollow attribute to link to your site.

Source: Axandra Newsletter

"Q: Hey, as long as we're talking about directories, can you talk about the role of directories, some of whom charge for a reviewer to evaluate them?

A: I'll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I'd ask questions like :-

- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.

- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn't speak well to the quality of the directory.

- If there is a fee, what's the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.


Those are a few factors I'd consider. If you put on your user hat and ask "Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?" you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory."

As far as the toolbar PageRank, I definitely wouldn't expect to see it in the next few days. Probably not even in the next couple weeks, if I had to guess.

Source: forums.digitalpoint.com

Inbound links are one of the most important factors that Google uses to determine the position of a website in the search results. Some years ago, it was sufficient to get a lot of inbound links to top Google's search results. Nowadays, it's not that easy. Google has started to detect unnatural linking patterns.

What are unnatural links?

Unnatural linking is linking that wouldn't happen if search engines didn't exist. Unnatural links are links that are built purely to increase the search engine rankings of a website. These links don't have topical relevancy.

For example, unnatural links are:
# inks from totally unrelated websites (that have no value to the web surfer)
# links from blog comment spam and forum spam
# links that exploit a weakness in server design (like form injection)

What are natural links?

Natural links are simply links that webmasters would also build if search engines didn't exist. For example, reciprocal links with related websites make sense (I send visitors to you and you send visitors to me, our visitors benefit from the links).

If a link is logical and on-topic then search engines will like the links. The following graphical example explains why on-topic links will increase your search engine rankings:

The topic of your website is symbolized by the green color. The more other "green" websites link to your site (symbolized by the green arrows), the deeper is the green of your own website. In that case, search engines know that your website is very relevant for this "green" topic and they will give your site high search engine rankings for search terms related to that topic.

Now lets take a look at the effect of unrelated links:

The links from unrelated websites (symbolized by other colors) take away the green from your website. They make it harder for search engines to identify the topic of your site. If you have a lot of links from unrelated web pages then your website becomes less relevant to the original topic of your site.

What does this mean for your website?

Links that are useful to web surfers are links that search engines deem relevant. Do now waste your time with shady link farm systems that promise hundreds of links in a short time. This won't help your website much. Better focus on high quality links that will bring your website targeted visitors while increasing your search engine rankings at the same time.

Source: Axandra Newsletter

There are a lot of rumors about one-way links, reciprocal links and three-way links on the Internet. Which of these links work best for your business and which links do you need to get higher search engine rankings?

What are one-way links?

A one way link is a simple link from one website to the other. For example, if you link to http://finance.yahoo.com/ and that page doesn't link back to your website then it's a one-way link from your site to their site.

What are reciprocal links?

A link is a reciprocal link if you link to a website and that website links back to your website. You send visitors to the other site and the other website sends visitors back to you. That makes sense because all visitors leave a website sooner or later. You can send your visitors back to search engines or you can send them to affiliates websites that send you traffic in return.

What are three-way links?

Some webmasters believe that reciprocal links don't help web pages to get higher search engine rankings. That's why they invented three way links: Website A links to website B, website B links to website C, website C links to website A.

Which links will help you to get higher search engine rankings?

Good inbound links will help you to get higher search engine rankings. None of the link types above is worth more than the other. It's important that the links to your website are from related sites and on-topic. If a reciprocal link is on a low quality page with links to every Tom, Dick and Harry then it won't count much. However, that's also true if the same page carries a one-way link or a three-way link.

It doesn't matter if a link is one-way, reciprocal or three-way. It does matter if a link is on a related website. Links from high quality websites will help your rankings, links from garbage sites won't. If you want to improve your search engine rankings, try to get links from web pages that have something to do with your site.

Source: Axandra News Letter

Many major SEO firms make it a standard practice to recommend the purchasing of links to their clients. The search engines actively discourage this practice, and do their level best to detect those paid links. Here are 15 things they can use as signals that a link is possibly a paid link:

1. Links Labelled as Advertisements: The search engines can scan for nearby text, such as "Advertisement", "Sponsors", "Our Partners", etc.

2. Site Wides: Site wide linking is unnatural, and should be a rare part of your link mix (purchased or not). The only exception to this is the interlinking of all the sites owned by your company, but this presumes that the search engine will understand that all of your sites are from your same company. In general, site wides are a serious flag.

3. Links are Sold By a Link Agency: Of course, link agencies are knowledgeable about the link detection methods listed here, and do their best to avoid detection with the links they sell.

4. Selling Site has Information on How to Buy a Text Link Ad: Search engines can detect sites that provide information on how to advertise with them. This combined with other clues about links being sold on the site could lead to a review of the site selling the ads, and a discounting of the links.

5. Relevance of Your Link: It's a powerful clue if your link is not really that relevant to the page it's on, or the site it's on.

6. Relevance of Nearby Links: Another clue would be the presence of your link among a group of links that are not tightly themed.

7. Advertising Location Type: The search engine can detect when your link is not part of the main content of the page. For example, it appears in the left or right column of a 3 column site, and the main content is in the middle.

8. Someone Reports Your Site for Buying Links: Who would do this? Your competitor! If your competitor submits an authenticated spam report to Google, it will get looked at, and acted upon.

9. Someone Reports Your Site for Some Other Reason: Perhaps your competitor does not recognize you are buying links, and turns you in for something else. Once this happens, the search engine will take a look at all aspects of your site, not just the reported issue.

10. Someone Reports the Site you Bought Links from for Selling Links: A competitor of yours can do this, or a competitor of the site selling links can do this. Once a search engine figures out that a site is selling links, it’s possible that this could trigger a deeper review of the sites that were buying those links.

11. Someone Reports the Site you Bought Links from for Some Other Reason: As before, this can lead to the search engine discovering that the site is selling links, even though it was not the core subject of the Spam report filed against it.

12. Disgruntled Employee Leaves Your Company, and Reports Your Site: For decades, many companies have had a practice of escorting fired (or laid off) employees out of the building. The reason for this approach is that people get upset when they lose their job. However, even this practice would not prevent such a person from reporting your site in a spam report to a search engine. Even though that may be a violation of the confidentiality agreement you probably have with your employees, you would never know, because there is no transparency in spam reporting.

13. Disgruntled Employee Leaves the Agency Your Used, and Reports Your Site: This same scenario can play out with an employee leaving the link agency you used. This form of disgruntled employee can report either your site directly, or the agency itself.

14. Disgruntled Employee Leaves the Site Your Bought Links from, and Reports Your Site: Finally, it can also happen with someone leaving the company you bought the links from. This type of disgruntled employees can report your site, or the site they used to work for.

15. Internal Human Review: Last, but not least, the search engine can do a human review. In general, search engines don’t do spontaneous reviews of sites, and wait for things detected algorithmically, or a spam report, to trigger a deeper review. But, you could certainly imagine that search engines could make an overt effort to clean up the search results in portions of their index they perceive to be spammy.

Search Engine Courses of Action

In the case of Google, it is known that one of the basic policies is to punish sites who sell text links by terminating that sites ability to pass link juice. This is essentially a first course of action. Once this is done, Google could look more closely at the selling site, and the purchasing sites for other signs of spammy behavior.

The search engines also take stronger actions at times, such as an algorithmic penalty, or banning a site from their index. I don’t know exactly how those determinations are made, but I believe that there are 3 major triggers for such action:

1. It can be the cumulative affect of several signals of poor site quality.

2. The search engine determines that a site has bought links on a large scale.

3. Upon human review, the search engine detects a clear pattern of an intent to deceive them.

Source: Stonetemple.com