Search engines assign different weight values to different types of links and the higher the weighted value, obviously the more that incoming link helps your website. The goal to a good linking campaign is getting the most valuable links without wasting your time with links that the search engines do not give any weight to. Below is a list and description of different types of links, how to get them and what they do and do not do for your website:
No-follow linksThese are the worst links to get and for the most part they are a waste of time. A no-follow link is a link that links to your website but in the code there is an attribute value (no-follow) set to tell the search engine not to follow the link. The only beneficial value to a link with the “no-follow” attribute is that your link is visibly seen which may or may not get users to click on it to go to your website; but the search engines will not give any value to these links because they do not follow them to your website. Some of the most common ways of getting links with the no-follow attribute are as follows:
- Lower quality directories sometimes use no-follow for their free submissions
- A lot of blogs have the no-follow attribute set for the comments section (this is to ensure that people don’t spam on another person’s blog because they have nothing to gain).
- If someone wants to display your web address on their site but does not want you to get the benefit of a link from them.
These are some of the most common types of links that consists of two sites that link to each other so they both gain some sort of SEO value. These links are usually fairly easy to get from directories or other websites but they require that you put their link on your website in return. If the content on the two sites are similar then the links will be viewed as more valuable but even still, reciprocal links are not valued to high in Google or other search engines. For example, if two sites about banking both linked to each other, the value of those links will be higher for both websites than if say a banking website had a reciprocal link with a pet store website. So it is better to get reciprocal links with sites similar to yours in regards to topics and content. But even if the two sites are not related you can still look at it as a link is a link. It may not have much weight to it but it is still a link and that only helps you and will not usually hurt you. The best way to get reciprocal links:
- A lot of paid directories offer free links with reciprocal
- Link exchange programs can be found on a lot of online communities
- Contact webmasters of sites similar to yours and request link exchange
- Some bloggers will offer to write a blog post about your website in their blog in exchange for their blog link on your website
The best links that you can get to your website are one-way links. These are links from other websites to your website without you having to link back to them. These links hold the most value because in the search engine’s algorithmic mind, if someone is linking to you with no link back, then your website is probably offering some sort of service, product or information that is important enough to not require a link back. Just like with reciprocal links, the more the content and topics on the site linking to you are related to you, the more weight Google will give that link. One way links can be acquired from a lot of different sources:
- Article writing
- Directories
- Blogs
- If you provided a good service for someone it may be worth them linking to you
- Forum signatures
- Resource websites
So when you are trying to get links for your website, keep a look out for these three different types of links and try and get the most value for your time. Look for part II of this article soon as we will be going into detail about the different ways to get links and a little bit more on link weight and Pagerank values.
Labels: link types, linking, linking campaign, no-follow links, one-way links, reciprocal links, search engine optimization, seo