Now I'm Confused Too, bad linking practices - pls explain Options

[Karri]

Ok, remember energy balance's post asking if certain sites were using naughty linking practices in how they exchanged links with other sites? Long and short of it was that, as Scottie explained, the problem was with many sites linking to many other sites.

To be honest, I am feeling a little brain dead about this one. I am currently researching potential backlinks and reciprocal links for a client. Here is a site I found (she works in the travel industry) that at a glance seemed like a good idea but now, harking back to Scottie's comments, I am feeling a little paranoid:

http:// www. discoverfrance.com /links.php

Is this an example of what you were talking about Scottie?

I am not sure I am "getting" it. Please help!
Karri

[Michael Martinez]

That page you found is using a free-for-all-style links page to maintain a reciprocal links program. This site is not operating a link farm.

Google is showing a cache of this page. It also lists this page as a referring site for one of the more obscure listings in its links list.

It is very probable that Google has determined there is nothing wrong with this page and is treating it as a highly specialized hub page.


ON EDIT: I had mistaken the page ownership for Karri's and have changed my comments accordingly to reflect that it is not her page.

[Karri]

No ... definitely not my site or a site I've designed!!

Am just researching potential backlinks for a client.

So, what is the difference bewteen a link farms and a free-for-all other than link farms tend to be more "automated."

And would this site be considered less than "worthy" of a link back to my client's site?

ARGH. The more questions I ask ... the more I have (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/eek.gif)

Karri

[Randy]

Let's see, how can this be explained?

The thing you want to watch out for Karri is a situation where every site in some network all link back to every other site in the same network. The automation part doesn't really figure into the equation from the search engine's perspective. Only the end result.

Think of a little diagram where there are 200 (or 2,000) sites represented, and each site is represented by a circle.

When sites --especially sites in the same general market-- start building linking partnerships, it is entirely likely that some sites are going to link to each other and link to/from some of the same linking partners.

While it would be natural that a small percentage of these sites might have enough in common that they all link to each other, the statistical probabilities that all of them would be reciprocating links with every other site in the network is about as close as you can get to zero.

Remember, the search engines all look at linking relationships. They're much better at determining this sort of thing than we mere humans are. For them it's a simple Yes or No question, which is what computers are best at. So for them to identify any sort of linking network is quite easy, if they bother to look.

Where it get Un-natural and a flag gets raised is when each one of those circles has an incoming link from each of the other

[Jill]

Karri, I think we're you're confused the most is in thinking that you need tons and tons of links.

A site like yours, a small VA business does not need tons of links to do well in the engines. You don't need a reciprocal links program, automated or non-automated. You don't need to add your site to free for all links pages, or anything like that.

Think about what types of sites have a target audience that would be interested in what you could offer. That probably depends on the type of virtual assistance you provide, but I imagine you have an ideal type of client? Where would they hang out? What kinds of pages would they be reading during their daily online travels?

When you figure that out, that's where you want to think about how you can get a link on those pages.

Stop thinking about linking for rankings, and think about linking as marketing (sorry Debra...stealing your line!).

[snipermilk]

Don't know if this helps, but here are some of the quality guidelines an India-based SEO company gave me when I inquired about their link building service (Jill might know them, I remember seeing their text ad in a HR newsletter issue a few weeks back)

Quoting verbatim:
1. Only Incoming (non-reciprocal) links
2. Links with specified "Keywords" in the Anchor Text
3. Links from sites that have PR specified links page
4. Industry relevant pages where links are placed
5. Link to your site should not be through a "redirect" script
6. No JavaScript links
7. No framed sites
8. No flash site links
9. No robots.txt exclusions
10. Exclussion in Robots Tag
11. No paid links
12. Links from Pre-indexed Pages only
13. Spread your site link across different domains
14. No SPAM should be used to solicit links
15. No links from Link Farms
16. No FFA networks
17. Don't get links from Blogs
18. No links from PORN, racially prejudiced sites and other sites containing offensive content
19. Full data sheet of links created at the end of each month
20. Only relevant established links should be counted in the final report

Some I think are pretty obvious, some aren't. One really needs to dig deeper when looking for quality link partners., e.g. IP/hosting data, domain age, etc. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[Jill]

I have some thoughts on these as I disagree with much of this:

1. Only Incoming (non-reciprocal) links - why? Nothing wrong with reciprocals.
2. Links with specified "Keywords" in the Anchor Text - Those are great, but ones without specified anchor text are also good.
3. Links from sites that have PR specified links page - This doesn't necessarily matter since toolbar PR isn't accurate or up to date, nor does it have any effect on rankings.
4. Industry relevant pages where links are placed - Also great, but non-relevant links count just as much.
5. Link to your site should not be through a "redirect" script - usually true, but Yahoo redirects your directory link, and many people pay $299 each year for those.
6. No JavaScript links - Agreed.
7. No framed sites - Why not?
8. No flash site links - Why not?
9. No robots.txt exclusions - correct, you don't want the page your link is on to be excluded from the robots.
10. Exclussion in Robots Tag - Must me no exclusion?
11. No paid links - why not?
12. Links from Pre-indexed Pages only - no idea what that means.
13. Spread your site link across different domains - agreed.
14. No SPAM should be used to solicit links - agreed.
15. No links from Link Farms - agreed
16. No FFA networks - agreed
17. Don't get links from Blogs - why not? That's the craziest one yet!
18. No links from PORN, racially prejudiced sites and other sites containing offensive content - what if your site is porn, etc?
19. Full data sheet of links created at the end of each month - helpful
20. Only relevant established links should be counted in the final report - sounds good.


[P.S. ads in my newsletter are just ads, not endorsements.]

[Michael Martinez]

NOTE ON EDIT: No idea why the quoting didn't want to work. Didn't have time to figure out why. So I improvised.

1. Only Incoming (non-reciprocal) links

--They don't understand the importance of outbound links.

2. Links with specified "Keywords" in the Anchor Text

--They don't understand the importance of natural links. You cannot think of every variation on a topical expression that people will use to search for sites like yours. So allow people to link in their own unique ways to your site, to help catch those previously unthought-of variations.

3. Links from sites that have PR specified links page

--Any site is welcome to link to mine. PR-specific linking rules are just nonsense.

4. Industry relevant pages where links are placed

--Nope. You want links from related industries, news sources, employee Web sites, friends' Web sites, directories, etc.

5. Link to your site should not be through a "redirect" script

--If it's a choice between a link that may send traffic and no link at all, I'll take the link that may send traffic.

6. No JavaScript links

--See no. 5 above.

7. No framed sites

--Why?

8. No flash site links

--Why?

9. No robots.txt exclusions

--Except for where the robots should not be allowed to peek.

10. Exclussion in Robots Tag

--I'd rather not have to look over their source code, thank you.

11. No paid links

--I'm too cheap to pay for them anyway.

12. Links from Pre-indexed Pages only

--Why?

13. Spread your site link across different domains

--That's an okay idea.

14. No SPAM should be used to solicit links

--I wonder what they don't consider to be spam?

15. No links from Link Farms

--Well, I wouldn't advise joining a link farm, but if one wants to link to me without my joining, I'm not going to turn my nose up at the link.

16. No FFA networks

--What do they mean by "networks"?

17. Don't get links from Blogs

--The only good blog link is the one that sends you traffic or the one that gets crawled by a search engine.

18. No links from PORN, racially prejudiced sites and other sites containing offensive content

--While I don't endorse or associate with such sites, I have no way of preventing them from linking to me. I don't lose any sleep over those links (and I do, actually, get a few).

19. Full data sheet of links created at the end of each month

--Well, it's a metric.

20. Only relevant established links should be counted in the final report

--As opposed to ALL the helpful links. Well, I suppose that's a metric, too.

[Randy]

OFFTOPIC:

The reason for the quotes not working is that you were trying to include too many of them Michael. I don't remember exactly what the cut off number is, but it's something like 10 quotes in a single post.

[oneofthe3lions]

(IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/censored.gif)

[snipermilk]

[P.S. ads in my newsletter are just ads, not endorsements.]

Oops sorry Jill, didn't mean to put you on the spot. But just in case it wasn't clear before: ads are ads, endorsements are endorsements (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) endorsements make good ads though, but ads aren't automatically endorsements...I think I should stop now hehe (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/wacko.gif)

[Bompa]

...1. Only Incoming (non-reciprocal) links - why? Nothing wrong with reciprocals.
...

It's a relief to see someone write that.

It seems more and more everyday I see webmasters preaching that reciprocal links are bad and having a page of them makes your site into a link farm.

Real link farms, in the original sense of the term, were fine way back in the old days. Then Google got wind of it and stopped crawling those pages.

Btw, for the newer folks, a link farm is a service that offers you 500, (or whatever), links in one month. To avail their service you download their updated set of pages every month and upload to your site. Because every member has the exact same set of pages, same content, (each page is a links page for a different category), and same filenames, Google can detect the pattern.

Since Google stopped crawling and indexing these types of pages years ago, the term "link farm" has begotten a very bad reputation and is now used with almost as broad a meaning as the term "spam".

A lot of linking strategies nowadays are a matter of "linking snobbery" where each webmaster implements his/her own idea of what a "quality" link is and imposes his own personal morality while trying to avoid "bad neighborhoods".

I don't think Googlebot nor Google's algorithm have any moral values whatsoever.

so there..!


just one man's opinion,
Bompa

[Jill]

Real link farms, in the original sense of the term, were fine way back in the old days. Then Google got wind of it and stopped crawling those pages.

Actually, they were never fine as their point as always to deceive the search engines.

The engines still crawl link farms just fine. But when they come to the conclusion that they are indeed just there for deceptive purposes, they will try to stop allowing the links to pass any link popularity.

[energybalance]

Ok, remember energy balance's post asking if certain sites were using naughty linking practices in how they exchanged links with other sites?  Long and short of it was that, as Scottie explained, the problem was with many sites linking to many other sites.

To be honest, I am feeling a little brain dead about this one.  I am currently researching potential backlinks and reciprocal links for a client.  Here is a site I found (she works in the travel industry) that at a glance seemed like a good idea but now, harking back to Scottie's comments, I am feeling a little paranoid:

http:// www. discoverfrance.com /links.php

Is this an example of what you were talking about Scottie?

I am not sure I am "getting" it.  Please help!
Karri

Back to Karri's question, I looked at the link she provided here... whats bike parts or biking in America got to do with travelling in France. For mine thats not a relevant link so surely the link from the French site to the Bike sites wont be benefitting the Bikes sites much at all due to the irrelevancy factor... or does it. How much does google know that its a French travel site thats providing the anchor link and hence give it zero importance.

Even with some of the other travel links you could say something similar. If every travel site did this, then ever travel site will have a mini search engine directory on their site. And thats just gotta be bad.

[Jill]

the link from the French site to the Bike sites wont be benefitting the Bikes sites much at all due to the irrelevancy factor... or does it.

Yes, it does. For one thing, relevancy doesn't (yet) come into play with most of the major search engines.

But even if/when it does, as long as you can find a common thread between the two sites, that's just fine. And surprisingly enough, there's nearly always some common thread that can be found between very differing subjects.

The main thing for links is that you want the site your link shows up at, to have a similar target market to those that would be interested in your site. As long as you have that, then you have a good...and sometimes even a great link.