When people hear that links hold weight with the search engines, the first thing they do is comb the website looking for people to link with. They don’t pay attention to whether these links are incoming or reciprocal links; instead they focus on any and every link they can find. Because all links do not hold the same value, beware of links that don’t benefit your website. It is important to understand which links draw attention to your site and which ones have no value at all. In some cases having too many outbound links can hurt your search engine rankings.

What Are The Best Links?

First, you want to have links pointing to your website and not vice versa. When the search engine spiders crawl your web pages and they detect the links pointing to your site and pointing from your site. Links pointing to your site is a sign that you are important, that your website has value and that is why other websites have your link on their page.

You always want links that are relevant to your niche. For example, if you are promoting designer dog collars, having a link for auto parts will not be of any value to you because it is totally irrelevant.

You should pick and choose your links carefully. It is said that sites that have been up for a long time have value, but this isn’t always the case. Sites that aren’t updated are crawled less frequently by the search engines and therefore, being linked to these sites won’t help you much. You are looking for sites with quality content, frequent updates, and that have some relevance to what you are promoting.

What Are The Worst Links?

Paid links or link farms should be avoided. While the offers may look appealing, these often result in links that will do nothing for your website.

Some visit auction sites to purchase links. These can be found on EBay and perhaps other sites where people are basically renting you links. They charge a monthly fee to put your link on their page and as long as you pay the fee, your link remains on their website. If you choose to go this route, you need to fully understand what type of site you will be linked to, the page rank of the website, and where on the website your link will be listed.

My feeling is you don’t have to buy links from other people. With a little work and a good website, you can gain links through contacting the webmaster. Sure some will say no, but you just move on to the next one. Why pay for something that may be poor quality, when you can get top notch links for free.