7 secrets you should know about ‘links’ to and from your blog

[pinakighosh]

‘Link’ is the small word that weighs a lot in the world of internet marketing. Successful links can make a site soar into unbelievable popularity. Two words that you need to know and understand are: (a) Links: your site pointing to other sites. (b) Backlinks: other sites pointing to your site.

1. Good content earns natural backlinks
A blog can get backlinks naturally if it serves good content. Search engines love good content and so do visitors. Thus other sites and blogs will naturally link to your site if you are providing unique, superior content. It is a slow but effective way of link-baiting.

2. Make directory submissions
Directories are sites that offer names and links of hundreds of sites categorically arranged. There are 4 types of directories:
• Pay-for-inclusion directories,
• Reciprocal required directories,
• Free directories,
• Niche directories.
Submit your blog to the most popular directories or hire a professional SEO to do the job in a professional manner. You will get the names of hundreds of directories from the links given below:
• StrongestLinks, http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php
• SEOCompany, http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/web-directories.html
Directory submission will make your site appear in directories, and the process may take several weeks. This will improve the Google PageRank of your blog if successfully done.

3. Link exchange
Another popular trick that is common is exchange of links with other webmasters. Your blogs will link to their sites, and their sites in exchange will backlink to your blogs. Not highly recommended since Google does not like this practice and there has been recent examples of sites whose PageRank was decreased for link exchanging.

4. Interlink your own sites and blogs
Again a good idea to make your less popular sites and blogs prosper with the help of your popular sites/blogs, but you should not link up all your blogs, especially the ones that have no relevance at all.

5. Go slow with adding links in the beginning
Google can ban your blog if you rapidly place hundreds and thousands of backlinks to your site within the first few days of starting. Add links gradually after starting your blog. This includes the links you place in forum-posts, bulletin forums, wiki sites or social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, Ecademy, Konnects, Xing, Orkut).

6. Avoid links from gambling or adult sites
Google does not like gambling sites, poker sites, or adult sites. Thus, you might be banned by Google if your site is backlinked from many gambling or adult sites. Besides, these sites are known to send harmful things like virus, adware and spam.

7. Mix and match
Google prefers that your backlinks come from absolutely different sites (different C class IPs). A good advice is, mix up links from trusted, old sites as well as new sites. Not more than 15% - 20% of your back-links to a site should be from PR 5+ pages.

Your blog will get additional importance with Google and other search engines, if links to your site come of sites with related or similar content. Besides you should also remember to link not only the home page, but to various posts as well. With these tips in mind you can hardly go wrong.

[sarahG]

You can't be penalised/banned for a particular site or type of site linking to you, else any business would do this to their competitor.

[Kevin]

Yes point 6 is wrong, you can't get punished for sites linking to you.

With regards to point 5, Google would only ban your blog if you got thousands of links in a way which is against their rules. For example, if you paid for a specific keyword on a large site with a lot of traffic you could get banned for trying to manipulate google. Likewise, if you used this technique with the same keyword over dozens of site you may get banned.

However, Google won't ban you if traffic is legitimate. This is why viral campaigns are so popular. For example, a newsbreaking story on a relative new or quiet blog could get thousands of links from thousands of different sites and Google would not penzlise the site for it.

[pinakighosh]

Hi,
Good to see reactions and a healthy debate. The above are my personal views from my experience with the internet for the last two and a half years, and others' views on some issues may be somewhat different from mine.

Like, in point 6 I said Google may ban you if you are backlinked from many adult and gambling sites. You can be backlinked from these sites only if you yourself operate an adult or gambling blog. Google has a team that monitors these and remove them from Google's index.

In point five I said do not establish thousands of backlinks in the first few days. What I hinted was, do not spam popular forums and Wiki sites. The hint was I suppose enough for the many to understand.

Cheers!

[Kevin]

With regards to point 6, Google will not ban you if you are linked from adult or gambling sites. I don't know where you have seen this before as Sarah said, Google cannot ban you for links which appear on another site unless it is clear that you have purchased those links to manipulate google.

With point 5, most forums and some wiki sites use the nofollow tag so it really doesn't matter how much you spam them (not that you should be doing it). View the source of some of the sites you mentioned and you will see the nofollow tag is usually used.

[smub]

You can't be penalised/banned for a particular site or type of site linking to you, else any business would do this to their competitor.

Agreed.... I would've done to all my competitors to eliminate them... and my competitors would do it to me. No more business in the market.. lol

[DigiKnow101]

do you have any list of free directory submissions that accept blogs?