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About JustLinx
JustLinx is a free market place for buying and selling links from your web sites. We do not monitor transactions at this point in time nor do we get involved in any disputes between buyers and sellers - in this regards we are not different to EBay. JustLinx performs a software driven analysis of each submitted web site. The results a believed to be accurate, however there are ways to manipluate the system. Therefore we do not guarantee any of the analysis results. We encourage you to do your own research!
Link Building (general)
One of the trickiest and most time consuming aspects of search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of building high quality incoming links. But on the other hand, link building the single most important thing you can do to improve your rankings. The more inbound links a page has, the more popular it is - and search engines like popular pages. The problem for most sites is to accumulate enough incoming links to appear relevant to the engines without tripping any one of the many spam filters and penalties that are applied to sites that cheat. The key point to remember is that search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN prefer natural link structures and train their bots to detect artificial link structures to penalize sites that do cheat.
Natural Links
Natural links vary in the anchor texts they are using while artificial links tend to be 100% identical. Natural links also increase gradually over time as referring sites add links one by one, artificial links tend to increase in large numbers all of a sudden.
Sites designed around natural links don't usually swap links, so their outgoing links tend to point to pages that are known by the engine to be in good standing. Oftentimes these pages have been indexed for many years and may even be white listed - a term that identifies trusted sites not to be penalized. Sites designed around artificial links will often participate in link swapping and have outgoing links that point to pages that resemble link farms, web rings, or isolated nodes (i.e. page groups linking to each other but lacking inbound links from outside trusted sites).
Natural links tend not to be reciprocal. Artificial links, however, rely heavily on link exchange tactics, suggesting that the sole purpose of the link is reciprocity - having little or nothing to do with adding value for the site visitor by way of providing worthwhile content.
Keeping these facts in mind, one should strive to build the most natural-looking incoming-link structure possible. From a search engine's point of view (SEPOV), the best kind of links are unrequested links. The engines are trying to put high rankings on those pages that people voluntarily link to due to great content - not because some webmaster has spent a lot of time swapping links. Read on for tips and tricks on how to build the best incoming-link structure and boost your PageRank dramatically.
Choose Your Links Wisely
While it's true that almost any link from anyone will add something of value to your page popularity, it's best to get links from authoritative pages. Such pages are considered important and are usually identified as such by Google within their PageRank scoring system. The higher the PageRank, the better the link. Directory examples would include sites like Yahoo and DMOZ. Others like Wikipedia, National Geographic, CNN, or ZDnet would be exceptional authoritative site links regardless of topic since each has been assigned a PageRank of 9 or better on Google's ten-point scale.
Your next best option is to acquire links from pages that are trusted. Trusted pages are sites that have been indexed for a while and have already been assigned a Google PageRank - usually PR=5 or better. It helps even more if these pages are on-topic - i.e. they match the topic of your page. Links from on-topic trusted pages can give you a significant boost in rankings.
Why the Number of Links on Referring Page Matters Another point to remember is the fewer the number of links on the referring page, the better. Ideally, the referring page would have only one link and it would be to your page. Of course, that's rarely practical. But, having your link on a page with 100 other links is almost pointless because the value of your link will be divided by the number of links on the page - a condition we call link dilution.
While easier said than done, the ideal would be to get your incoming links from popular, on-topic pages that have few outgoing links within trusted sites scoring PR=6 or better. Now, short of the ideal, bear in mind that every link you can get is likely to help you somewhat - and if you can control how those links appear (in terms of incoming URL-format and anchor text), you'll be in even better shape.
Link Exchange
When all else fails, you may begin considering reciprocal links. Although we don not recommand this strategy all that much because search engines are continuously getting more sophisticated about detecting artificial linking patterns. Unfortunately, one of the most artificial linking patterns is reciprocal links, since natural link patterns are not typically reciprocal. If Yahoo lists a site in their directory, that site doesn't routinely link back to Yahoo. Of course there are plenty of exceptions, but, regardless, the search engines are looking for pages that rank well due to popularity based on content - and they want to avoid sites where it appears the webmaster has spent a lot of time just exchanging links.
So, look at things from the search engine's point of view. If the TIMES runs an article about how great your company is and your company's site links back to the TIMES article, does that look normal from the SEPOV? ...sure it does. Besides, TIMES is an authoritative site that is white listed. They can do no wrong in the eyes of the engine and the link exchange looks like a natural link structure from the SEPOV. And, your site's page can expect a substantial boost in ranking.
On the other hand, if your site (with it's PR=4 or 5) is linked by John Doe's homepage with a PR=1, 2, or 3 and you link back to Joe's page, you shouldn't expect much, if any, boost in your rankings. In fact, it's entirely possible the two links are discounting each other based on an assumed link exchange arrangement that looks contrived because neither page is "authoritative" from the SEPOV.
Now, if you had, say 50 similar link arrangements, and the links were on-topic, and none of the pages involved had tripped the spam filters, then your page should get a reasonable boost in rankings. Still, you'd fair better simply by getting a single killer link from an authoritative site like CNN, Yahoo Directory, DMOZ, ZDNet, and so forth.
The point is, focus your efforts on collecting all the links you can from authoritative sites. Most importantly, be very careful about who you link back to because you might just be diminishing any benefit that would otherwise be derived from your incoming link. And, in terms of building page relevancy, there is rarely, if ever, any benefit to linking back to sites that are insignificant, untrusted, or suspected of behaving badly in terms of SE protocol. It can even hurt you.
Be Careful Who You Link Back To!
Gaining links from off-topic and perhaps not-trusted sites may not be your first choice, but, reportedly, it won't exactly hurt your rankings - they might even help a little. However, beware of getting yourself into a link exchange relationship with these sites and remember that you should not link back to them. Currently, the rule is that incoming links won't hurt you but outgoing links to sites that behave badly, can.
In other words, if you're left with only the option to swap links, be sure you do so carefully because linking to a site that has been penalized for policy infractions (i.e. search engine spam) can cause your site to be penalized as well. To help you avoid such a scenario, here are four cautionary steps you should take before linking to another site:
- Buying links to your web site is simple: Search for their domain name on Google and Yahoo. If they're not listed on one or either of the engines, that's a bad sign. Linking to them could get your site penalized and possibly banned. Besides, even if they aren't a so-called "bad" site, linking to a site that the engines don't know about won't help you in the rankings anyway. However, if they are listed you can proceed to step two.
- Determine who is already linking to them. The more incoming links they have, the better. And, the more important the sites that are linking to them, the better. Their PageRank score is one indicator of how important Google thinks the site is.
Beware of linking to sites or pages with a PR=0 (zero). This could mean that they've been penalized by Google. Granted, this test may not apply to very new sites, but if a site has been around for a while and lacks any PageRank, then you should be wary of linking to it.
- Avoid linking to sites with controversial topics. Good examples of such sites would include gambling, adult, pharmacy, or loan/debt sites (unless you happen to be in one of these industries and the topic matches the content of your page)
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