As part of our SEO Basics series we are providing helpful hints and tips on one of the most important areas of SEO, backlinks and link building. Links are like a referral in business. Putting a link to another site on your homepage tells a search engine that this site is relevant and of interest.
There are fundamentally two different types of links in SEO, ‘nofollow’ and ‘dofollow’. The nofollow link instructs the search engine spider not to follow the link to the next document. This is used for any link which is exchanged for money because it is not compliant to pay for links in order to manipulate search engine rankings.
Dofollow links instruct the robot to follow the the link to the next document and providing the link is relevant and from a reliable source, the search engine will index this link and the site that is being linked to will go up in the search engine’s estimation. This is why quality, relevant SEO friendly content can be a powerful tool in dominating SERPS because others are more likely to link to it.
Hyperlinks:
Simply put, a hyperlink is a reference in a page or document which leads the user to another page or document, either local or external to the current site.
From a design point of view we can link almost anything with the <a href=”foo.com”>tag</a> – this could be text, an image, inline or interactive content. Combined with the class or ID tag, we can style this content in any way we want.
From an SEO perspective we need to focus on how we can utilise every hyperlink without ‘over optimising’ or compromising usability. For instance:
Title tags – <a href=” http://foo.com” title=”foo”>foo</a>
Anchor text – <a href=”http://foo.com”>foo</a>
Target – <a href=”http://foo.com” target=”_blank”>foo</a>
are all examples of how you can manipulate a link but doing all of the above excessively over the whole of your document or domain may be considered ‘over-optimisation’ which can lead to devaluation of your links.
Links and Search Engines:
Most people are aware of the power of the backlink and these tend to be the backbone of an SEO campaign, however search engines have now begun to shy away from rewarding the mass link-building approach and are giving a higher priority to better quality links. Links and search engines are constantly topics of discussion online and it is often regarding link directories and search engines.
An online directory works much in the same way as a copy of the ‘Yellow Pages’. There are listings of every conceivable industry and companies make submissions to these directories, making it easier for search engines and internet users to find their website. However as many of the directories accomodate dofollow links they can also help in boosting ionbound links to a site and therefore potentially help acheive SERPs. Although many believe directory linking to be inefficient, our research points to relevant, industry specific directories still providing SERPs benefits.
Internal and External Links:
An internal link is a link inside your website which will typically consist of either an anchor text or navigational link to another area of the same website. A correctly configured and SEO friendly site will have a site that flows perfectly when CSS is disabled and each link is relative to the content contained on that site. For example, the navigational bar on a shoe sales website contains the following links and all the text is linked to the correct page, making it flow correctly with CSS disabled and thus is SEO friendly.
- Home
- Men’s Shoes
- Ladies Shoes
- Children’s Shoes
A good example on how not to link internally would be to use ‘click here’ anchor text rather than the relevant terms. For instance:
- To Go Home – Click Here
- For Mens Shoes – Click Here
- If You Want Ladies Shoes – Click Here
- Maybe You Need Some Childrens Shoes – Click Here
Ensure all your internal links are relevant and the search engines will love you for it.
External inbound links are links going to your site that do not belong to your domain. Also known as backlinks these are incredibly powerful devices when generated organically and from authoritative sources. However this is where anchor text is very important: the power of an external link pointing to your site with the correct anchor text could mean the difference between ranking and not.
An excellent example of incorrect anchor text would be the Adobe site: if you do a Google search for ‘click here’ – get.adobe.com/reader/ is the first result, upon checking the backlink anchor text you can see a significant amount of back links with the anchor text ‘click here’. Where possible ensure the back links to your site are on-topic with a relevant keyword as anchor text for a contextual link.
Reciprocal Links:
Reciprocal links are essentially a link exchange between two websites, (although there are more complex ways of linking such as the A-B-C link exchange or multi-way linking). In previous years, this was a very powerful tool for increasing a sites authority and improving search engine results but can now result in penalisation and link devaluation by search engines as people have maliciously implemented link exchanges purely to manipulate their listings, usually involving irrelevant sites in bad IP neighbourhoods.
Link Compliancy:
All our links need to be compliant with search engine standards. This means no malicious hidden links, no keyword stuffing or automatic pop-ups which could hinder a user’s experience on your website and be seen as Black hat SEO.Google has been founded on advertising revenue so of course there is no issues with linking on an advertising basis providing that link is marked as a ‘nofollow’, however once links are being exchanged for money to manipulate search engine rankings, then compliancy is bieng breached and penalties can be incurred.
Link Spamming:
Powerful organic links are an SEO’s best friend, however it’s not always possible to generate a lot of links or create enough link-bait, and so some people revert to spamming or paying for their links in order to raise their rankings. A search engine will index a site periodically depending on its size, relevancy and PR. If the search engine returns to a site and it has 50,000 inbound dofollow links overnight or over the period of a week, then the search engine will begine to ask questions.
Link spamming is the practice of setting up domains purely to embed as many links as possible. This will result in being penalised or even banned by Google for using black hat SEO techniques. Some less reputable SEO companies will employ techniques like this without the clients knowledge or consent, which can be disasterous for SERPs. Linking is an essential part of SEO and for this reason some like to cut corners, make sure you are asking the right questions of your SEO company regarding their linking strategies.
Related posts:
Understand the issue of compliancy, however it is not that simple. Paid linking for SERPs manipulation is still a big part of the linking game and how can a search engine prove that a contextual link is there from revenue.
Providing the links are relevant, contextual and to a decent source it is tough to prove that a backlink is a ‘paid link’. This is especially true if your site has been rated as a trusted source by the search engine.
Maybe it’s just me but I’ve been seeing a rather large increase in spammy sites in the SERPS that hold no relevance to the search in question.
Hopefully the latest updates will resolve these issues and we can start good linking campaigns and those blitzing links left right and center will gets what’s coming to them.
if links, with relevant anchor text, placed in content that is relevant more important than just the link itself, does that mean directory sites are becoming less important?
@Tabown
Google is manually scanning websites to see if the links on are paid for. This is a time-consuming job.. You can help Google by submitting websites that ask money to publish your links: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66736
This way we can all help for a better web!