Link Value in SEO Campaigns
Links Defined
Link – a textual or image link TO another site – usually included for the benefit of your visitors because it contains important information relevant to your product or service. Usually set to open in a new window so visitors don’t “lose” your site when they open the link. Outward links are of minimal value to your search engine rankings – unless you have a lot of them relating to a common “theme” – in which case your site might be perceived as an “Information Hub” for referrals on a specific topic.
For example, it might be appropriate for a medical-related site to provide links to support groups, goverment/health agencies, doctors and pharmacies with whom they work etc.
Affiliate Link
You place a link to a provider in order to make a commission out of selling their product/service to your visitors. There is zero value in terms of search engine rankings. And of course, there is no point linking to them if you are not going to sign up and sell their products! 
BACK LINKS:
Reciprocal Links
Where two sites agree to provide LINKS TO EACH OTHER for mutual exchange of visitors, and to increase the relative importance of both sites by increasing total incoming link count. Reciprocal links have value in terms of improving search engine rankings, although this value has diminished in recent times. It is still a “natural” form of linking and should not be avoided – just apply this test – “Will the link lead to relevant information, of value and interest to my site’s visitors?”
If the answer is yes, then by all means exchange links. Done properly, constrained to sites with a similar theme, this may also lead to your site being perceived as an “Information Hub” for referrals on a specific topic.
1-Way Back Link
A link to your site, not requiring a link in return. These are the most valuable form of linking in terms of search engine rankings. Usually these are from clients – e.g. a manufacturer such as Sony/Toyota/Kodak will have a gazillion 1-way back links from retailers, users etc, as will government agencies, airlines, academic institutions etc. This can lead to your site appearing to be an “Authority” on a specific topic.
In most normal web site situations, your main source of good 1-way back links will be Web Directories. In these, a listing in the most relevant category can provide a very valuable “reference” or “testimonial” for your site. Because most directories are human-edited, the search engines place greater value on such links and the well established ones are often regarded by the search engines as “trusted sites.” The more important the directory, the greater the value. In the case of Google, they place huge importance on a site’s inclusion in The Open Directory, and also in the Yahoo Directory… It is important to select the most relevant category in which to have your site included – the content of the page in which the link is contained may also be assessed. 
Changes To The Way SE’s Evaluate Links
Google bases approx 50% of its assessment of your site relevancy to a specific search on the site’s that link to you, and on the words contained in the links pointing to your site.
Yahoo has recently filed for patents for technology similar to Google’s Page Rank assessment mechanism, and is expected to gradually implement a similar emphasis on incoming link quality.
It is important to specify HOW the link to you should be implemented on other sites – and to that end I always add a “Link To Us” page on any site I work on, which specifies the exact wording to be used on links TO you.
Can’t Find Your Site on Google?
If you wonder why your site does not appear in a search on Google, you can quickly check if its actually being indexed… try the following search;
“site:www.yoursite.co.nz” and of course, replace “yoursite” with the URL or YOUR site!
This should produce a list of all the pages in your site that Google has found, and decided were worthy of indexing. If no pages were found then you need to call The SEO Guy!
Google offers several similar little tools, and each of these provides useful information about your site, and an insight into the way Google “sees” it. In a Google search box, just type the operator and your domain name (less the http://www/ portion as per the previous example.)
| Operator | Description | Search Format |
| site: | Indexed pages in your site | site:www.yoursite.com |
| allinurl: | Pages that refer to your site’s URL | allinurl:www.yoursite.com |
| link: | Pages that link to your site | link:www.yoursite.com |
| cache: | The current cache of your site | cache:www.yoursite.com |
| info: | Information we have about your site | info:www.yoursite.com |
| related: | Pages that are similar to your site | related:www.yoursite.com |
Google Sitemaps
Signing up for a Google SiteMaps account is also a good move as a great deal of extra information about your site – as Googles sees it – is available. This includes Crawl and Index errors, and also a range of Crawl & Index statistics. It is possible to gain an insight into what keywords Google associates with your site – both from the site itself, and from the sites that link to it! The errors (if any) are very important, as they may reveal sound reasons for google not indexing your site fully.
Whilst submitting a sitemap is in itself no guarantee of inclusion, or of rankings, it can help get all pages indexed and at the same time ensure that appropriate emphasis is placed on the most important pages. E.g. that the Product/Services pages are treated as more important than the About Us, Privacy Statement etc pages.
If your site does not show up in the site:yoursite.com search, you certainly have a problem that you need to get to the bottom of! There can be avariety of reasons for exclusion from Search Engine idexes, including;
- Insufficient incoming links – some Search Engines think that if no one links to you, then you are not indexing…
- You have duplicate content – multiple domain names pointing to the same pages
- Other transgressions such as hidden text, excessive use of doorway pages, cloaking etc
If you cannot figure it out, feel free to contact us for assistance because we get to deal with these kinds of issues every day!
Multiple Domain Names Penalty
If you own a web site AND you have multiple domain names registered, you might want to read this with your full attention. There are a great many web sites out there which, by inappropriate use of multiple domain names, effectively cripple their search engine rankings by blatantly breaching search engine guidelines! Site owners often register more than one domain, and there are sound reasons for doing this, including;
- The main URL includes a keyword phrase but is too long to type quickly, so a shorter, cryptic one is utilised and maybe is also used on business cards and letter heads.
- You take various versions of domains to prevent competitors from grabbing them – dot.com, dot.co.nz, dot.biz, dot.info etc, and point them all to the “main” site.
- You take various country versions – dot.co.nz, dot.com.au, dot.co.uk because you are going to expand into those markets – but in the interim you point them all to the “main” site.
There are also misguided reasons for doing this, including;
- Having multiple domains pointing to the same location in the hope that the search engines will be duped into indexing ALL of them as different content, giving you lots of top rankings under different domains.
Search engines hate duplicated content with a passion… but their automated spiders and bots cannot determine which category YOU fall into – uninformed and innocent of intent, or deliberately and knowingly manipulative. So all sites who transgress can expect to be treated equally. And yes, you can be banned from the SE indexes for getting it wrong!
The search engines do not give out many guidelines – in fact they are all very coy about giving too information much away. However, when they do make a statement by way of guidelines, regardless of how politely it is worded, you had best sit up and take notice because they are really, really serious about it!
Google Guidelines on Multiple Domains
In the case of Google, their Webmaster Guidelines are unambiguous! E.g. on this page; http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 Google are quite clear on this;
Quality Guidelines – Specific Guidelines
- Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
- Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content
What This Means to You
There is a clear and present danger in having multiple sites pointing to the same location if they load exactly the SAME content - this is a SERIOUS breach of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and is expressly FORBIDDEN because the search engines can only interpret this as a blatant attempt to generate duplicate content under different URL’s. Regardless of your actual intentions in this, its likely to result in a BAN from search engine indexes. Not a good start to an online presence, right?
Ignorance of The Law is No Excuse
Ignorance of search engine guidelines is not a valid excuse either! Unfortunately, many web designers and hosting companies are blissfully unaware of the correct way to implement multiple domain names. The result is that many web site owners unknowingly jeopardise their site’s inclusion in the search engine rankings.
My advice is that if you have more than one domain name, you check how its been set up. If your have two domains; http://www.2nddomain.com and http://www.2nddomain.com and BOTH load the same pages but with the different domains showing, then you have a problem. If you can also load the sites as http://www.2nddomain.com and http://www.2nddomain.com then totals 4 different ways of indexing the SAME content!
The Right Way to Do It
That said, it IS permitted to have multiple domains pointing to the same content BUT it may only be done via the use of a Permanent 301 Redirect being applied to the secondary domains, e.g. typing in the URL for any of the secondary domains will redirect you to the main site. This change can easily be implemented, at no cost other than a few of minutes of time.
In this example, http://www.2nddomain.com is redirected to http://www.2nddomain.com and and neither visitors nor SE spiders ever “see” content under the secondary domain name. The same logic should also be applied to the non-www versions of both domain names to complete the process and to prevent potential conflicts with the search engines.
