Website owners, especially new website owners, tend to turn to this kind of linking strategy to help get them indexed in search engines or to just simply start gathering up links that point to their website.  While this used to be a relatively decent way of gathering incoming links not too long ago, the value of trading links with someone today has diminished.

If someone requests to “trade links” with you, they’re essentially saying “If you put my website link on your site, I’ll put your link on mine.”

For example, if you have a website that talks about landscaping and you’d like to get more links pointing to that site, you’d do some searches in Google or whatever search engine you choose to find other sites related to your topic of landscaping.

You might find sites on plowing gardens, growing flowers, organic gardening, plants, etc.  You would then contact each of these sites and see if they’d be willing to link to you if you in turn linked to them.

Given all of the additional linking strategies you can use, reciprocal linking should be one of your last resorts to gathering links.  That being said, it can still be an effective strategy so long as you keep your reciprocal links to a small percentage of actual links to your site.

Here are some tips to follow:

1. Keep your reciprocal links to a small percentage of overall links coming to your site.  If you currently have 100 links pointing to your site, make sure that only around 10 or less of those are reciprocal.
2. Keep any reciprocal linking strategy on-topic.  Don’t link just for the sake of linking, make sure that whomever you decide to trade links with that their site is on a related topic that would be beneficial to your site visitors.
3. Be sure the site you want to trade links with has some kind of PageRank.  Obviously, the higher the better but any kind of PageRank at all means that the site has been around long enough to receive visits from Google.
4. Don’t start off your linking strategy by trading links with other sites.  Instead work first on getting one-way links and then blend in a reciprocal linking strategy.
5. If you do find a site you’d be willing to trade links with, look first to see if they have a spot where you can submit your site first.  If so, see where your link will be located.  If you’re link will be listed on a page that houses dozens of other links or worse still, is a page called “links”, you’d do your site well by looking for another site to trade links with.  Oftentimes pages labeled “links” or pages that consist of dozens of links don’t fare well in the search engines and thus won’t do you much good.
6. Contact the site owner of a site you want to trade links with and ask if you can get a link on one of their interior pages, preferably all by yourself or at least with few links already contained within it.

All in all, reciprocal linking isn’t inherently “bad” but it shouldn’t be your first choice when trying to gather incoming links.

The Question:
Hello,
I have a burning question and I can’t find an answer in SEO course available.
If you do this search: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=kurir&btnG=Search

You’ll notice the first result has 8 other links besides the main one (Crna hronika, sport etc.). That must increase the CTR a lot.

The question is: what makes Google do that for one site and not for another one?
What should you do with your site to get such extra links in the results?

Best Regards,
Eko

Here’s an example of what they look like:

These are called “Site Links” and the bottom line is that Google does not tell you exactly how to get these sitelinks for your own site.

However, each website that contains these sitelinks has a few common denominators:

• They’re typically an authority site.
• They have an easy-to-navigate hierarchical structure.  In the case above, there is a section for “Sports”, a section for “Stars” and a section for “Politics” as Eko pointed out.
• They have lots of incoming one-way links from a variety of sources.
• The sites are easy to navigate.
• The age of the site tends to be a defining factor.

If we pick apart the site above, there’s a few things to note about it:

• The site has a PageRank of 6.
• It has over over 100,000 links pointing to the site itself including internal pages.
• Sites such as these generally have been around for years.
• The site has lots of useful information that readers enjoy by clicking through to various pages.

You’ll generally find these sitelinks on major news sites like CNN and highly visited sites such as Oprah’s site at Oprah.com.

So while these sitelinks can be a huge boost for your search engine traffic, they aren’t easy to come by.  Google must deem your site “worthy” enough to receive these sitelinks.

If you use Google Webmaster tools, at http://www.Google.com/webmasters/tools/ and you’ve added your site, you’ll be able to navigate to the section where Google tells you whether or not any sitelinks have been identified on your site as candidates for the Google Search Results page.

The bottom line is that there is no hard and fast rule to getting sitelinks placed on your site aside from some of the factors that are believed to be important as mentioned above.

If you’d like more information about sitelinks, visit:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=47334&topic=8523

Kristine

Any business, online or off needs to know what their competition is doing so that they can stay ahead of the game.

It’s not a new practice by any means.  Companies for years have kept close tabs on their competitors but, unlike brick-and-mortar businesses, as website owners we have a much easier way of detecting what our competition is doing; at least online.

Here’s a few tips to get you started:

Google Alerts
Google Alerts allows you to set up your own alert system so that you will be notified whenever someone mentions you, your company, or your products.  However, where it comes in handy for SEO is when you use these alerts to notify you whenever a keyword used in your industry is mentioned in a blog post, on a web page or in a news release.  Additionally, you can also set up Google Alerts to notify you whenever someone mentions your competitors.

Google offers various alerts you can sign up for:

• News alert: A news alert will tell you whenever a phrase you chose has shown up in the latest news articles.
• Web alert: A web alert will show you the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice.
• Blog alert: A Blog alert will show you the latest blog posts that contain your search terms.
• Groups alert: A Groups alert will let you know of any new posts in groups that contain your search term.
• Comprhensive alert: A Comprehensive alert will show you the latest results from many sources allowing you to check out multiple sources at once.

The Internet Archive: You may very well already be familiar with the Internet Archive which shows you year by year and month by month how a website has changed. So why is this important to you and how is it important to SEO?

The Internet Archive allows you to go back and take a look at how your competitors website has changed its content over the years and even find out how often they do so.  You’ll also be able to see what changes have been made to their sales copy as well. Don’t underestimate this very valuable tool!

Search Status Tool: This tool is one that a webmaster should not be without and one that I personally use. This convenient free tool for your Firefox browser shows you at a glance what a webpage’s PageRank is, what their Alexa popularity rank is, where incoming links are coming from via Alexa, a WhoIs search what’s in their meta tags, what kind of keyword density a page is using and more. This is an incredibly useful (and free) tool.  Just remember, you’ll need to be using the Firefox browser in order for this to work for you.

Many new website owners are often told that in order to start getting good incoming links, they need to focus on web pages that have high PageRanks first to get those links from.

While a PageRank does come into play in certain circumstances, it is not the be-all-end-all of getting a good incoming link.

First let’s talk about what PageRank is and why it’s become such a sought-after item.

PageRank is the value that Google (not Yahoo!, not MSN) assigns to a web PAGE depending on how important Google believes that page to be.

Google of course doesn’t tell us all of the factors that make a page “important” or “unimportant” but rather leaves it up to the community at large to try and decipher.

That being said, we do know a few things about how web pages do get better PageRanks. One of the most important factors are the incoming links to a web page. Note that I said “web page” and not “web site”. Each web page on your site is ranked differently than all of the other pages on your site.

If you by chance have a web page that has a PageRank of 6 for example, this does not mean that your entire website has a PageRank or PR of 6, it just means that the one page on your site has a PR of 6.

Back to the matter at hand…we know that the more important the links are pointing to your web pages, the more that Google will likely view your page as important thus giving it a better PR. However, the links that point to your web pages are not the only factors that determine whether or not your web pages get a good PR. There are other factors such as how well your site is laid out, what kind of content you have on that web page, if that web page is “information driven” or “money driven”, etc.

So now that we know at least a portion of what gives a web page good PR, let’s talk about how this factors into incoming links.

Many new website owners are led to believe that in order for their web pages to get to the top of a search results page they must have a number of high PR sites linking to them.

Why this can be so detrimental is because the PR you often see listed for a web page is rarely the actual PR of the page. Google updates the PageRanks that you and I see on a very intermittent basis. However, the PR of a web page is constantly moving up or down on Google’s side of things.

While it is rare that a PR of a page would move drastically in one direction or another, it should not be the only factor that you use when determining who to attempt to get links from.

While it can be helpful to have a high PR site linking to you (high PR being 5 or above), you should not simply focus on getting links from sites that have these high PageRanks.

What most people forget is that there is a natural flow of links that come to any one web page. No one site, even those with high PR’s such as Google themselves or CNN.com for example, have all high PR sites linking to them. Website owners all over the internet are linking to these sites because they contain high-quality information that their site visitors would find helpful.

And the links coming to these sites run the gamut from PR0 sites all the way up to high PR sites, those with PR’s of 6 or above.

The bottom line is, it is the number of links, how relevant those links are to the overall theme of your website, what words are contained in the anchor text they’re using (the clickable portion of the text), how many sites are linking to THAT site, and more.

It’s important to note that just because a web page has a high PR does not mean that it will automatically rank well in the search engines, which is what most website owners are after when they first head out and attempt to find links to their own site.

Instead, it’s important to focus on simply getting links to your site rather than focusing on what the PR of those sites are.

One of the first things I tell people when looking to get links to their site is to first determine who is linking to their competition.  If you simply do a Google search for a keyword you’re focusing on, and determine who is listed in the top 10 positions in a Google and then further determine who is linking to them you’ll be at a much greater advantage than just those who simply seek out high PR sites to get links from.

The bottom line is when you’re first working on getting links to your site, the last thing you should concern yourself with is the PR of a site.  Instead, focus on getting links from the same places your competitors are and be absolutely certain that the site you’d like to get a link from is relevant to the content on your own web page.

1. PageRank is not the be-all-end-all.  As a matter of fact, the PageRank of a page that you see is rarely the real PageRank of someone’s web page and should be merely used as an indicator.
2. SEO and The Meta Keyword Tag are not one in the same.  The Meta keyword tag is used within your web page’s code and tells the search engines what keywords you’re targeting for that page.  Just because you put keywords in this tag does not mean you’ve optimized your site.
3. There is no need to submit your site to the search engines.  The search engines will find you on their own and you can help them by getting a link from another web site that is already indexed in the search engines.  Preferably one that gets visited on a regular basis.
4. Learn to link bait!  Link baiting (while sounding like something illegal) is really nothing more than writing something that others find interesting and useful and that they’ll want to link to.  Lists are good for linkbait.
5. No, you cannot rank well overnight for a competitive keyword phrase.
6. SEO is an on-going contstant process.  You simply don’t “optimize” and then move on.  You must keep at it; the search engines are ever-evolving and you should be too.
7. If at all possible, don’t design your site without considering all of the SEO aspects to it first.  It’s easier to have your plan laid out in front of you rather than having to fix items as they come along.
8. Use your main keywords in your title tag.  This is a simple but often overlooked strategy.
9. Use a sitemap on your site. If you’re not, you should get to work building one.
10. Understand RSS and how to use it to your benefit.  RSS should not only be limited to your blog.
11. Know who your competitors are.
12. Use an analytics program for your site so that you have access to your websites stats.  Google analytics works well and its free if you have a Google account.
13. Do your keyword research and start working with terms easy to rank well for first.
14. Don’t try to shortcut the process (use techniques that could harm your site).  Be patient and it will be all worth your while.  Try to shortcut the process and you’re playing with fire.

Since the client didn’t want any outgoing links and had such a high PR on the site, the person who had developed the site wanted to know if it was ok to put the same color text on the same color background on a few of the pages, linking to the developers own sites.

This is called “invisible text” and will label you a spammer, at least where the search engines are concerned.  Your own personal moral character might not feel that way but to put it frankly, that doesn’t matter.

Needless to say, I recommended (strongly I might add) that they refrain from doing so.  Actually following through and doing such a thing would likely cause not only the site with the invisible text to get banned but the site it links to, to get banned as well.

In our BoneheadSEO classes that are coming up in 2009, we’ll cover black-hat techniques in great detail so that you can be fully aware of the tactics that may get you banned.

We’ll talk soon.

But, as more and more people get familiar with, and use, the nofollow tag, these quality incoming links are getting harder and harder to come by.

Let me explain.  A few years ago Google endorsed the “nofollow” tag within your links.  This meant that any link you had on your website or blog that you didn’t want Google to follow, if you simply placed the rel=”nofollow” parameter within your link tag, Google would not follow that link to its destination page.

You might wonder why a website owner would choose to do something like this.

Well, there’s a few reasons:

1. The web page that the nofollow link is located on may not want to pass link juice.  For example, if a web page has a PageRank of 6 every link located on that page gets a piece of that PageRank passed on to it and the web page owner might not want to give all links on that page a portion of its link juice instead choosing to keep all or most of the link juice for themselves.
2. The web page may have affiliate links on the page that they don’t want search engines following.  If a search engine sees that you are linking out to lots of affiliate sites, they may devalue your page.  Therefore, by using the nofollow parameter, these links don’t get followed back to the affiliate’s page.

However, there are still people online who don’t use the nofollow tag in their links.  Whether this is by design or simply not knowing any better and it’s these pages that you want to locate so that you can get a true incoming link to your site.

That being said, here’s how to find sites that do follow your link.

It’s important to note here that if you find a blog related to your site’s content that you’d like to leave a comment on, be sure that the comment holds some value.  Don’t simply post a non-sensical message just for the sake of getting a link back to your site.

Here are some dofollow blog directories that list blogs that all follow your link:

• DoFollowBlogs – http://www.dofollowblogs.com
• FollowList – http://www.followlist.com
• DoFollowDirectory – http://www.dofollowdir.com
• DoFollow Blog Directory – http://www.bigfootwebmarketing.com/dofollow/
• DoFollow – http://www.dofollow.us

And if you’re looking for a list of blogs aside from a directory that do follow, check out these resources:

• WhyDoWork.com – http://www.whydowork.com/blog/blogging-tips/558/
• BumpZee – http://www.bumpzee.com/no-nofollow/blogs/

Lastly, there are many blogs who have downloaded and used the CommentLuv WordPress plugin.  What this means is that these people who are using this plugin have specifically chosen to follow links posted on their blog.

This source gives you a comprehensive list of blogs that are all using the CommentLuv WordPress plugin.

And if you’re curious how you too can add the CommentLuv plugin to your WordPress blog, visit http://www.fiddyp.co.uk/commentluv-wordpress-plugin.

And lastly, if you want to be sure that a blog or site is still following links, you’ll want to download a Firefox plugin that will highlight all of the nofollow links on a page.  This allows you to see at a glance which sites are following and which ones aren’t.  I created a video a while back to show you how this works.

Don’t be shy!  Do you know of more resources that list blogs or sites that do follow?  Let us know by commenting below.