The Importance of Link Partners

Importance of Link Partners

Introduction

Over the past few months I have learned an important lesson concerning the importance of link partners. That lesson being - you need them. Okay, that is too simple, and you have probably figured it out on your own, but let's take a look at why you need them.

The three main reasons you need to obtain link partner relationships is as follows:
1) Google looks at inbound links (those linking to your page(s)) in determining ranking for its algorithm.
2) People actually come to your site by clicking on links from your partner web sites.
3) It is good to make friends.

A Personal Note: Internal Pages Being Removed From Google Index

No one can say for sure what comprises the full algorithm (except for its developers), but through careful analysis of search results of your pages after each reindex, you might begin to observe certain patterns. For instance, Google now seems to weigh the number of highly relevant links that go to a page more heavily now than it did a year ago. We have also recently noticed that internal links of large websites that do not include inbound links from outside web pages may be either not indexed, or taken off the index. This is especially true for sites that include a lot of linking. We have noticed this on our http://GiftIdeasPlus.com site where all of the pages that were more than three levels from the home page were unindexed or never indexed at all.

What really sucked was that we noticed it about three weeks before Mother's Day and information pages, such as for Mother's Day History were not indexed, and any page I had which included links, such as links to Mother's Day Recipes or Mother's Day Teacher's Resources were taken off the index altogether.

What was worse was when last week, the www.BiographyPlus.com website lost about 80 to 85 percent of its indexed pages. A little less than 90 pages are in the index, when last week over 500 were indexed. The biography pages are only third level from the home page. I think that there are a combination of three reasons for the sudden loss. First, I have not spent any time in acquiring link partners. Google may not bother with a page unless other websites go to it. Which makes sense on its face, but how are other websites going to know about the unless they find it (usually) through search engines. [Note: Google Site Maps does not automatically mean that the pages will be included either]. The second reason for the unindexing of the pages may be due to the content. For the most part, many of the pages include the same content as the Celebrity site and it is penalizing BiographyPlus.com. Google does not like mirror sites - and may not even take into consideration that the two sites are set up differently and that BiographyPlus.com includes many other non-celebrity biographies that are not included on www.PopStarsPlus.com. The third reason is the fact that BiographyPlus.com includes many "index" pages which all are made up of links. Google does not really like pages which include "link only" content and may leave my site before fully indexing the deeper pages.

So what am I going to do about it? First, as I have been doing with PopStarsPlus.com, I am gaining additional link partners, Secondly, I am going to try to add some type of content to the top of the index pages. Maybe this will keep the spiders from going away. Thirdly, I may also redesign the home page. Google's own webmaster guidelines state that it does not like pages with more than 100 links - so maybe I should listen and cut out most of the linking on that page.

Google Algorithm and Inbound Links

As noted above, inbound links are one of the factors in Google's algorithm. However, be wary of what that means. First of all, it takes into consideration the type of link coming in. A link from a highly rated website that has relevant and related information to your site will be looked more positively than a random link from anysite.com. In addition, what type of site is it? Links from link farms are pretty much meaningless and may even have a negative influence on the results. So it is important to find sites that provide content that is related to your own. If you have a site about dogs, you might not pursue links from a site about home restoration. Another canine website would be preferable, although a general site about pets might not be out of the question.

Generating traffic from Inbound Links

If you have your link on a respected website, web surfers are more likely to trust the links provided on their site. This could provide additional traffic to your website. If you have been in this business long enough you will see that links on most link farms will not generate anything. If you have specialized content on your site and find other sites/pages with that specific content, there will probably not been many links listed -- these could lead to many additional visitors.

Making Friends on the Web

In order to create link partners, it is up to you to find them (although if your site is good, they might find you first). Once you find them, contact them. This could lead to a beautiful relationship between your two sites - even if the sites are somewhat in competition with each other. For most sites, I do not believe this to be the issue especially with celebrity websites. There are so many potential visitors out there and so much information about celebrities, that it will be a long time until there is any true competition in this area. This is why you see so many celebrity sites that link to each other.

There are many reliable websites out there. One of our favorite partners is www.TopSynergy.com. They have a really good and informative website. The site includes information about celebrities, but its main focus, as their motto reads is as a "Relationships Analyst - Home to the seekers of successful relationships." Our relationship had begun solely for the swapping of links, but at times we have delved into conversations regarding such items as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to help each other to suceed.

Conclusion

So, what have we learned?
1) Inbound links from other related websites are important - not just any site will do.
2) A good inbound link could increase traffic.
3) Forming relationships with other like websites could be advantageous to both of you.
4) Do not put too many links on any one page.

I hope this helps someone out there,

Till next time . . .
Ian