Is a link simply a link?

It isn't if you know how to get ranked for competitive keywords. Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live search are all link centric but each has its own algorithm that treats the dozens of factors in ranking somewhat differently. This is why it can be difficult to rank high in all the search engines for your keywords at the same time.

The best way to develop a good linking campaign is to know what is important now, and what is likely to be important in the future. These are the factors we use to get our clients ranked in the search engines.

This is certainly the most important factor in developing a link campaign with all three of the search engines. Anchor text, and to a lesser extent the words around the anchor text on an inbound link page are critical ranking criteria for the top three search engines.

Anchor text should be varied, as should the paragraph surrounding the anchor text, in order for your link building effort to appear natural, as opposed to a link scheme. The words around your link help to achieve topical relevance.

The age of the link is of little importance to MSN/Live search but quite important to Google and Yahoo.

Image links with relevant alt text provide some weight. Images within content, and text links are preferred, due to the content surrounding the link compared to an image at the bottom of a page or in the navigation sidebar. Don't just stuff keywords in alt text and keep alt text length to a minimum.

A page with little content or too many links on it will provide less value. Try to find pages with fewer than 75 links, the fewer the better, and with 300 or more words contained in the body text. Links contained in navigation , header, or the page footer are not as valuable as true content links.

In order for your link to count at all the page you obtain a link from must be indexed. A page that is cached, and shows a recent cache date, is considered more valuable than one that is not cached or has a stale date. A page with a cache date in the last 30 days is quite good and over 60 days considered less than valuable in most circumstances.

If the page is indexed in Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live search that is certainly a good sign. If the page has inbound links that is a plus. Lots of inbound links even better. If the page ranks for a competitive keyword then it is a real winner. A well placed link on these pages can draw traffic as well as provide link juice.

A huge volume of links adds up. Sitewide links will not contribute to your ranking score as effectively due to the large volume of links from the same domain but overall it is still is a viable strategy. Sitewide links generally are in repeated sections of a page which can also be detected.

A domain with 500 backlinks that achieves a sitewide thus creating 10000 links rapidly will most likely be filtered. Link building should be a steady process, not a trickle followed by a gusher.

Reciprocal linking does work. Like many other things, too much is bad for you. I suggest that reciprocal links be a small part of the link building strategy for most domains. I suggest you consider these concepts as you make decisions related to reciprocal linking:
♦ Does the reciprocal topically make sense from the visitor's point of view
♦ Does the domain offer good content and look professional
♦ Does the site link to bad neighborhoods or appear to use spammy anchor text
♦ Do not reciprocate on link pages. Select content pages that topically relate to your "linked page"
♦ Stay three clicks or less away from the home page, two if possible.

Page Rank is not the end all be all of linking. It is a consideration but shouldn't be the decision maker in your link building strategy. Page Rank 0 pages pass juice. Some pages do not lose public (tool bar) page rank but pass no juice at all due to purchased links and other bad practices.

There are various ways a link can be placed on a page. Some are virtually worthless, while other simply devalue the link. A short summary of each is included below:

♦ Direct HTML Link

A link that is created using HTML referencing the exact page the browser is destined for is best. These links are easily spidered and are not devalued.

♦ Javascript Links

Links that are created using Javascript are of little value since spiders generally examine Javascript looking only for mischief. Cloaking, sneaky redirects and other black hat methods are generally the focus of any spider that bothers with Javascript at all.

♦ Redirected Links

Some links use redirects to keep track of clicks meaning that the link does not point directly to the page of the browser destination. These links still provide juice but perhaps do not provide the value or worth derived from direct HTML links.

♦ NoFollow Links

An attribute called nofollow can be included in a link that actually tells search engines that the link is not a vote for site credibility and does not pass juice. These links are indexed by all the search engines but prevents Google from crawling the destination page. Yahoo does not pass attribution but does crawl the link destination looking for new content. MSN/Live does recognize the nofollow attribute but I am unsure of their crawling or attribution practices.

Just dropping links anywhere and everywhere means two things. One, you are a spammer, and two you will need hundreds of thousands of links to rank and will never know which ones were beneficial and which ones were not.

Evaluate the top 3 on page one for your target keywords. Identify the quality and quantity of their link building campaign using backlink analysis and advanced search operators to set a goal for the links you need to compete and excel in your niche for specific keywords.

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