8 replies to this topic

[maimax]

Hi

I have 10 travel websites.

Should I do cross link all of them at the footer in order to send users to booking each city and increase pagerank.

I will use domain-name.com to be text link,such as, [examples removed]


Many Thanks

[Randy]

How is linking in the footer going to help visitors? Are they even going to see it before they've already looked around one of your sites and left because it doesn't provide what they need? Personally, doing it only in the footer sounds like a cop out to me. Where it's really for the search engines but you want to make it sound like it's for real visitors.

Link where it makes sense for visitors, and where it'll actually help them.

[chovy]

Hi

I have 10 travel websites.

Should I do cross link all of them at the footer in order to send users to booking each city and increase pagerank.

I will use domain-name.com to be text link,such as, [examples removed]
Many Thanks

Cross link in the header.
If they are all related, it would be helpful to your users to see a bar with your links:

[Andy LoCascio]

Cross linking in the footer should not be discounted so quickly. There is certainly some SEO value to doing that. Though I agree that if you want your visitors to actually use the link, it should be more visible.

Using the domain name as the text link is not the optimal solution. But having a text link that reads "NYC Hotel Reservations" and goes to a domain that features that content, is an efffective method for improving the keyword phrase rank of the recieving site.

We often create a group of mini-sites (domains) to support businesses that have a multi-city presence. The sites typically have the same layout but different content (with respect to geography in this example). They all have their own link exchange structures (also related to the geography). Since each of the sites will have a decent rank for "Hotel Reservations" (without the city abbreviation), cross linking in the footer is an effective method for using some of that rank.

[Jill]

Though I agree that if you want your visitors to actually use the link, it should be more visible.

But if they're not there for users, then they shouldn't be there at all, period.

Google is looking for stuff that's in their users' best interest, remember?

[Andy LoCascio]

Suggesting that cross links in the footer are not there for visitors, is debatable...just because it is at the bottom of the sreen does not mean it has no value, it just means that it is not the highest priority...if the page was short, or the visitor scrolls down to the bottom, they often find useful info there (sitemaps, contact info. address, etc.).

Thankfully, the Google spider is an automated function and that provides us opportunities to maximize the SEO effect of less visible content.

This is a business where we need to do our best to improve keyword phrase rank, hopefully without compromising readable and/or the visitors experience.

I do agree that the Google SE is intended to find the best possible search results, but which result is the best is surely a subjective decision. Have you ever looked at all the Guthy-Renker sites? Give someone a big enough budget and they can get you a top 5 rank for ANY keyword. Where's the benefit to the end users in that?

SEO is about maximizing the impact of our clients limited budgets. And yes, that means not just building effective rank, but also ensuring good conversion rates which are direectly proportional to the quality of the content. If we need to add some cross linking at the bottom of the site, and it does not results in stuffing, we should do it even though it has little overall impact of the end user's experience...

Just my two cents...

[Jill]

@Andy LoCascio you were the one who said this:

Though I agree that if you want your visitors to actually use the link, it should be more visible.

So either you figured users would use them or not.

Certainly when I was newer at SEO I would do things to sites just because I thought they were good for SEO and not necessarily best for users. But you know what? You learn over time that those things typically don't work they way you expect them to, at least not for very long.

That's because Google wants to show the sites that are best for the searcher, not the sites that have the most SEO.

[Catz]

Have you ever looked at all the Guthy-Renker sites?

Article: Beware of Internet Schemes - Ever heard of Guthy Renker's Choice Mall?
http://www.allbusine.../5968871-1.html

[Andy LoCascio]

I agree on the Guthy-Renker issue...however, but no matter how onerous you may find what they have done, you cannot dispute the results...for their core products they control multiple entries on the first page for the most requested terms...

I agree with Jill, that some methods we fall in love with early on, may fail us later...this usually happens because we find a method that seems to produce a good result, and then push beyond the point of being reasonable.

Some things we do, like cross linking in a footer, probably fall somewhere in between a purely functional, user friendly approach and an overly agressive SEO technique. I have to admit, that we often stray more towards the latter until we see declining rank. Fortunately we monitor rank very carefully and we cannearly always find the offending modification and reverse it.

Realize that we are just dealing with the content side of this issue. Partner linking has so much more effect on the overall phrase rank picture.

I apologize for such long intervals between replies. For some reason I am not getting any email notifications of new posts. I will look into the problem.