Link Building - A Thing In The Past?

All links are not equal on the Internet. And the ones that are worth more to you are those that flow into your site from other sites. It's those links that the search engines take notice of, increasing the ranking of your site in their listings. When your site goes up in the listings, it gets seen by more people and you get more visitors.

One-way link generation has been the aim of web site owners for a long time. Different methods have come (and gone). You may remember the era of the "link farms", where you would be offered links back to your site for a fee. The problem with link farms was that they were content-poor and rated by search engines as spam. While you were not necessarily penalized for having links from such sites to your site, search engines finally accorded no value to these links and therefore no positive change in your search engine ranking.

It's good to understand a little about how search engines think about links. The basic idea is "if a good site has a link to another site, the good site is voting for that other site, so that other site must be quite good as well". Search engines have different ways of measuring what a "good" site is.

Google for example uses its own calculation called Page Rank (in fact, named after Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, even though Page Rank does apply to the specific pages of your site). The more esteem Google has for a site, the higher the Page Rank. The higher the Page Rank for the page where the link to your site has been placed, the higher the value for you.

So in this sense, Page Rank is an interesting indicator. It explains why people are typically more interested in having you put a link on your home page going off to their site, because often it's the home page of the site that attracts the highest Page Rank. It's also a reason for you wherever possible to check on the Page Rank of sites that you would like to see linking to you.

You can do this with directories for example as their Page Rank can be identified using the Google Tool Bar and you can then submit your site. Just watch out for directories (and there are many of them) that insist on a link back from your site. In this case you lose the advantage of a one-way link.

If all this is making you go cross-eyed, let's have a look at some other possibilities. You can pay for one-way links in other ways as well. Pay-per-click adverts are one solution. You make your ad of 20 words or so and you then put a link to the page where you want the viewer to go when they click on your ad.

This has no effect on your search engine ranking, but it can be a big booster in traffic generation. As you pay when a person clicks on your ad (which means they automatically go through to your web site, but not that they automatically buy from you), then make sure that you are getting a return on your investment. Internet also now has several sites offering classified ads. Sometimes, perhaps for a limited number of ads, this can be free. Other solutions ask a flat fee for including your ad in their pages.

Don't want to pay? You don't have to, if you are prepared to do some work. You can also get your one-way links by writing and submitting articles. Write your articles around keywords that are of interest to you for your site. Then follow article site submission procedures to submit your article and your link back to your site.

Lately, yet other systems have become available. One of these is the three way linking system. The idea is that if you link to a site, and that site links to a third site that then links back to you, you can avoid the reciprocal link trap. There are some finer points to reckon with here. For example, the three sites should not be hosted at the same IP address. But it appears that for the moment, when this system is correctly set up, search engines consider the links to be one-way links in all cases and so each site gets the benefit.

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