What Is A Link Worth?

An Introduction to Why you Should or Should Not Link

You have created a great celebrity site with all of the most up-to-date information about Diva Starr, your favorite musician. You now want to make sure that everyone else out there knows about it too. You have done everything you can to the site - but you do not know if you should spend all of your time trying to get reciprocal links from other sites. You have also heard so many things about it -- inbound links, outbound links, link farms, deep linking, reciprocal linking, this linking, that linking. Is it all really worth it?

Google and Linking

Every time Google has a new re-indexing, some websites seem to make huge leaps in terms of search placement and page ranking and others take a dive. For instance, PopStarsPlus took a good 10 to 15 percent dive in January during and after the reindex. Luckily, we have bounced back, but we tried to see what it is that made us lose search placement on Google. Not to ignore the other major search engines here, but it seems that everyone around the web is obsessed with Google search optimization, so that is what you will find the most information about. I also know the most about that and interestingly enough, Google does generate the most traffic for us than any of the other search engines. But it is because of how Google looks at the linking of websites is how many of us develop our sites -- yes, even though we think of ourselves as being independent, Google does dictate how we go about our web business. [A good place to visit is Google's own page entitled "Google Information for Webmasters" at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html.]

History of How Search Engines Look at Linking

The More Links The Better

Going back a few years, the theory was: the more links you had the better. This was then modified to: the more links you have pointing to your website the better. Having links pointing to your site are called inbound links. Links from your site to another are called outbound links. In a perfect world, you would expect the better your site, the more other sites would want to link to it -- therefore, the more inbound links, the better the site.

Link Farms and Relevancy

But we do not live in a perfect world, so link farms were created. These are web sites that will trade links with any site in order to get more links so that they can rise in the search engine rankings. They may link with websites that have nothing substantively in common with them. There is no relevancy between the two sites. The search engines became suspicious of these sites and began to think of ways to circumvent this. They tried to place a relevancy for each site based on its content. So, a link from a website about Angelina Jolie to another website about Angelina Jolie would be linking of relevant content to similar relevant content. Supposedly, this would give more "weight" to the link as opposed to a link from a Zsa Zsa Gabor website to the same Angelina Jolie website. So, if a Brad Pitt website has 3 links from other Brad Pitt Websites and 100 other links from other celebrity websites, it may not list as high in a search result for a Brad Pitt Website that has 10 links from other Brad Pitt websites and only 15 links from other celebrity sites. [If the search engine were only looking at linking as a factor]

Here is an example of what I think relativity is akin to: Let's say you want a guide to lead you on a mountain expedition in the Andes. One person you interview has been climbing for about 11 or 12 year, but has been to the top of Everest, K9 and a few other high peaks. The second person has been climbing for about 20 years, but most of it has been limited to the South Eastern United States, with one ascent up Mount Marcy in New York state. Here you have two different people with relevant experience -- however, if I am heading to the Andes, the guy with the Everest experience is the one I want with me.

Personally, when it comes to search engines, this is not the best factor to judge websites by. New websites have not had the chance to get sites to link to them and others just may not spend the time trying to find reciprocal links while less "relevant" sites perform this task very aggressively. As I said in a recent post, I am going to be spending more time trying to get these reciprocal links to keep up my traffic - even if I do not like it.

Inbound Only Links

The buzz about last year's Google reindex was that inbound only links are the best to have. What these are are links that come in from another relevant website but you do not have a link back to them. My comment is that if you are a site that provides resources to your visitors and the website that links to you is so "relevant" than why should you be "penalized" (I cannot confirm this) for not linking to another great resource?

Other Linking Tips

Another point is how the text of the link is written. If other websites are linking to your Donald Trump website and "Trump Empire" are your main key words -- try to get the text of the reciprocal link to read "Trump Empire" -- this is another one of those little things that the search engines like.

And one more quick comment - the search engines may also look at the currency of either the link itself (when it was put up) or the web page that the link is coming from (when was it last updated). [This is something that I read somewhere, but cannot confirm that the search engines are actually using this as a current factor.]

Link Summary

So should you get as many links as you can? I guess it would be best if you found websites that you like or are relevant to your own content to go ahead and try to links. Do not worry about inbound or outbound only links, just that the links are "relevant" to your site. But just remember, especially those of you who have set up celebrity sites because you are big fans -- the most important thing is to have fun with your sites.

Until next time . . . .

I.R.