Anyone who knows much about SEO knows that backlinks – where one site links back to another – are important for your search ranking. The more backlinks you have, the better – in general. But there are good links and there are bad links that you don’t want. Google considers some backlinks to be worthless or even poisonous to your site’s health. So, let’s talk about links – good links and bad — and figure out which links you want to have and which you should avoid like Dengue fever. Good Links Google loves nature. Naw… they aren’t out there bird-watching. But they do they want to see Internet nature taking its course. They want the content placed on the Web to be so amazingly bomb that people will just link to it naturally. So, for example, look at Wikipedia. When you search for just about anything, you will probably see Wikipedia listed on page 1, often at or near the top. Why? Because people want to explain things to their readers, and it’s much easier to add a link to Wikipedia than to go into a long explanation. Though you can’t really rely on Wikipedia to provide 100% accurate information, many people think that you can. So, Wikipedia gets tons of backlinks. I won’t get into a discussion of how fair this is not, but suffice to say, I think it sucks. Don’t get me wrong… Wikipedia has its place, but Google has made it just a little too powerful when you can’t completely rely on the research there, capiche? Yet, Google sees these backlinks as “good” links because they happen naturally. Do Follow and No Follow There are two types of link that can be potentially good or bad, but it’s a coding convention that can either allow search engine spiders to follow the link from one site to another or tell them to STOP right there. Do Follow links are best because they do allow search engine spiders to follow a link to wherever it eventually winds up. No Follow links stop the spiders from going any further with a short HTML tag that is added to the link. (rel=”nofollow”) This is automatic in WordPress. Because of so much spam commenting in years gone by, the WordPress developers decided that all comment links would be no follow. So, links you may be earning through WP blog comments, for example, are usually no follow links. Though do follow links are preferred, the SEO community has been hashing and re-hashing the idea that no follow links still pass some mojo. Yet, no one has been able to come up with a definitive answer. Only the Google ghods know for sure. That said, your linking profile should look natural. You should have a distribution of both types of link. If you have only “do follow” links, it’s a sure signal to Google that you’re doing something wrong. Reciprocal Links Reciprocal links, where one webmaster links to you and you link back to his or her website from yours, used to be a great way to get backlinks and a way to getting your site rank higher. However, Google has changed its position on links such as these. Though reciprocal links won’t hurt you, they probably won’t help you much, either. Google doesn’t see them as having been earned. Yes, according to the Big Dog, if you don’t at least bleed a little for your link… it’s pffft! One-way links are best. That means, a site just links to yours, period. You don’t link back from any of your pages and search engines consider a one-way link a “vote” for your site. The more votes your site has, the better your rankings will be. Bad Links These are the worst type of backlinks to have, and these links can get you into major trouble. You can even suffer the dreaded state of Web existence called “de-indexing.” Yep… Google can just take your pages out of their search index, period. That’s hard to recover from. The biggest no-no is paid linking, where you pay a service to place your link on sites with higher page rank than yours. This used to be perfectly OK, too, but a few years ago, Google decided they wouldn’t allow paid linking any longer because they saw paid links as “gaming the system.” It kind of was, in reality. Paid linking is kind of like buying votes in an election. Sure, it’s done, but you don’t want to be caught doing it. Google also denies links that you got through any kind of linking system , which they call “link schemes.” Link wheels, which were big a couple of years back, for example, were an easy way of getting your pages ranked in search. In these systems, … Continue reading →