If you have either a website or a blog, you’ve probably received at least one email (probably hundreds) from someone you don’t know offering to exchange links with you and saying they’ll add your link to a PR 3 or PR 4 website. Hopefully you’ve turned them down but if not, you’re not alone so don’t beat yourself up over it.
  Remko van Dokkum via Compfight |
Many years ago when I first started getting that, I only had one website and blog and thought that wouldn’t be such a bad idea. There turned out to be multiple problems.
One, these people would add you to their website, but never to a page that was clickable by anyone. In other words, it was a hidden page that was basically meant to fool search engines, and that type of thing is frowned upon.
Two, none of the sites carrying my link, as I probably did it 5 or 10 times before I caught on, were related to anything I did. I was savvy enough to figure out how to find most of them, and my link would be floating on a page with lots of other links that didn’t relate to each other, and none of them related to what the site was about.
Three, I only had one links page, thus each and every one of those folks were getting a good link back from my site. It looked like I was recommending these businesses when in truth I didn’t know or care about any of them.
Eventually I caught on and deleted all the links from my site. Strangely, only one of the people who’d contacted me earlier about adding the link ever contacted me again asking me about it. That showed me that the others really didn’t care and weren’t monitoring it at all. It also taught me that linking just for the sake of linking didn’t do anyone much good.
When I wrote my post about why I wouldn’t chase backlinks, I did know that Google loves seeing websites connected to each other, and used links as a way to determine how authoritative a site is in the eyes of other users (Google loves using the word “authority”). I also knew that they had started devaluing a lot of websites that looked like link farms, especially large sites like eHow and EzineArticles, sites with tons of links and articles that they had determined were lousy, and they were.
Going after links like that is a lousy job. These people send out tons of spam messages and have no idea who they might have already sent a message to. Even now, I get tons of these a day, probably from the same company (as they all send them out through Gmail without signature files so it’s hard to prove) since the wording is always the same. I think “how pathetic” and yet I also know that there are some people who are like I was many years ago, thinking that this is a good deal and are taking these weasels up on their offer.
Here’s 5 quick truths about linking:
1. Backlinks from sites that don’t automatically require trading links are always preferable. Sites like Facebook & LinkedIn can give you links like that.
2. Internal linking can do you a lot of good. It pretty much means you need to either remember a lot of what you write about or be willing to search your site and blog for something specific but it can work wonders.
3. If you comment on a lot of blogs as a strategy you’re not going to get much of a SEO boost from it. You may get visitors back to your blog, and that’s just as important if your blog is part of your business.
4. You probably won’t hurt yourself if you have lots of links on your site that don’t relate to your business. That is, unless your business model requires swapping tons of links with others, and I mean thousands; you’ve probably already suffered there. On my business site I have links to businesses I’ve done work with that have nothing to do with my business; that’s fine.
5. When all is said and done, for most people, and I’d say 99.9%, linking is less of a benefit for you than your website’s content is. As big a deal as Facebook is, if you can’t drive traffic from them it’s doing you no good. And you drive traffic to your site by having content people want to see, so that when you share your link or others share you link it’s compelling enough to get people to want to stop by.
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