Website Link Exchange

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Permalink Reply by Craig Eubanks on December 11, 2007 at 11:42am

Hi Darren,

You are correct in that Search Engine Algorithms take into account links to a web PAGE. I emphasize the word PAGE, because search engines don't index sites per say... they index the content by individual URL. So for example, if you had 1000 links coming into your site for one of your webpages at

www.yourwebsite.com/content/pagewithlinks

It would have little impact on your site home page. The search engines don't care about sites. They are about content. One of the ways they determine the value of content is by links to it. This is one reason Internet marketers are so hot about what is called Web 2.0 a.k.a Social Bookmarking.

I don't have time to explain how all that works, but the short version is a fast easy way for people to provide links to your content.

Now, another thing to know about linking and SEO (Search Engine Optimazation) is this... The Page Rank of the incoming link makes a HUGE difference to the search engines like Google. In fact, Google doesn't even bother to show back links unless they come from a site with PageRank 3 or above.

For example: This site Hypnothoughts.com currently has a page rank of 0/10. Right now, Google might not even know this site exists, and a link from it is almost worthless.

My site HypnosisMarketingTips.com is currently at a 2/10. Last year it was a 3/10. Google changed their Page Rank algorithm and I got bumped down.

A site like Wendi.com has a page rank of 5/10, which is a little surprising as she is one of the most popular hypnosis sites on the Internet. I would have thought she would be at least 6/10. Still, a link from her would hold a lot of weight with Google.

The page ranks are also logorithmic. So a link from a site with page 2 is worth 1000 links from a site with page rank 1.

Note that Google will say page rank 2/10 but there is also a scale within range 2. They just make it simple and say you are a 2.

So the takeaway lessons for getting ranked are as follows:

1. Search engines love content! Content is king. One of the best ways to do content is with a blog.

2. Links are important, but only if from higher ranking sites.

3. You can get the same effect as linking through Social Bookmarking sites like
* StumbleUpon.com
* Digg.com
* Technorati.com
* Del.icio.us.com
* Bloglines.com


And Web 2.0 sites like
* Facebook.com
* LinkedIn.com
etc.

One last comment. SEO is a moving target. Google, the 800 pound Gorilla of Search (70% of search market), regularly changes their algorithms to keep their result relevant. This is affectionately known as a Google Slap.

You can go from #1 to #10,000 overnight if you try and 'game' the search engines. And frankly there are businesses that do nothing but work like hell to keep their clients high in the rankings.

My point... there are much better ways to get traffic to your website, get new leads, and to market to your ideal prospects.

Always evaluate your business efforts by the 80/20 rule. "What is the 20% of my efforts that brings in 80% of my business". Then focus on the 20%.

Cheers,

Craig Eubanks
HypnosisMarketingTips.com

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Permalink Reply by Darren on December 11, 2007 at 12:06pm

Hi Craig, Thanks for the great information. Darren

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Permalink Reply by Pattie Freeman CH.t, MST on February 24, 2009 at 2:24am

craig

Thanks for sharing I just happen to run across this topic and find it very interesting I do my own websites and wanting to find out how these companies rate your site higher when it can be possible I can do the same. I am new at this so I am learning each and every day but I see I am getting the exposure. As I understand the more you link the better the you are or am I wrong? thanks for sharing I enjoyed your post...thanks

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Permalink Reply by Dan Gordon on August 25, 2009 at 9:21am

Darren,

I looked at your site and was wondering exactly what you mean by link exchange?

Dan

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Permalink Reply by Darren on August 25, 2009 at 9:59am

Hi Dan,

You put a link on your website about me and I put a link on my website about you.

Check out my link exchange page: http://www.darrenhiller.com/linkexchange.html

Darren

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Permalink Reply by Scott Sandland on August 25, 2009 at 10:10am

Quick Correction to what Craig said:

HypnoThoughts has a google page rank of 2. THIS page on HypnoThoughts get's a 0/10, but the home page is a 2.

Everything else he said was spot on, so I just figured I'd let people know, for the record, that Google has heard of us :)

-Scott

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Permalink Reply by Chris Swan on August 26, 2009 at 12:22am

I'm a SEO consultant, and while some of the information on this thread has been accurate, much of it is mis-information and potentially very confusing for people who are new to SEO.

"The Page Rank of the incoming link makes a HUGE difference to the search engines like Google. In fact, Google doesn't even bother to show back links unless they come from a site with PageRank 3 or above"

Do not confused public PR with internal PR. You are also in danger of suggesting that any link from a site (or page) with less than PR3 is worthless. This is so not true.

"So a link from a site with pr 2 is worth 1000 links from a site with page rank 1."

Where did you get this information? It is wildy inaccurate and 1000% misleading.

"Links are important, but only if from higher ranking sites."

Again, incorrect. What is your obsession with page rank? Unfortunately many webmasters get obsessed with page rank, forgetting that page rank is just a number. Sure it's nice to have a high PR, but it does not say where you will appear on the SERPs (search engine result pages), because it is not related. All quality links are important - but the key is quality and relevancy.

Regards,

Chris

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Permalink Reply by Craig Eubanks on August 26, 2009 at 10:02am

Chris Swan said:

I'm a SEO consultant, and while some of the information on this thread has been accurate, much of it is mis-information and potentially very confusing for people who are new to SEO.

Agreed SEO can be confusing. Which is why I urge hypnotists to only do the fundamentals and leave the latest "shiny thing" tactics alone. Such as creating link swap pages. An old tactic that even in it's heyday was marginally effective at best.

"The Page Rank of the incoming link makes a HUGE difference to the search engines like Google. In fact, Google doesn't even bother to show back links unless they come from a site with PageRank 3 or above" Do not confused public PR with internal PR. You are also in danger of suggesting that any link from a site (or page) with less than PR3 is worthless. This is so not true.

No, all links have some value. They may encourage a site to get spidered, or an actual human to follow it and look for information.

But, page rank of the linking site does carry weight in ranking. A simple search on Page Rank reveals the following:

From: http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html

What is PageRank?

PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page's importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page's PageRank is calculated.


Here is Google's own description of pagerank:

Google describes PageRank:
“ PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important".


And this important warning about linking to PR0 sites from From: http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html

Notes:
Not all links are counted by Google. For instance, they filter out links from known link farms. Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google. They rightly figure that webmasters cannot control which sites link to their sites, but they can control which sites they link out to. For this reason, links into a site cannot harm the site, but links from a site can be harmful if they link to penalized sites. So be careful which sites you link to. If a site has PR0, it is usually a penalty, and it would be unwise to link to it.

"So a link from a site with pr 2 is worth 1000 links from a site with page rank 1." Where did you get this information? It is wildy inaccurate and 1000% misleading.

Fact: Google's PR scale is logarithmic or darn close to being logarithmic.

If the PageRank value differences between PR1, PR2,.....PR10 were equal then that conclusion would hold up, but many people believe that the values between PR1 and PR10 (the maximum) are set on a logarithmic scale, and there is very good reason for believing it. Nobody outside Google knows for sure one way or the other, but the chances are high that the scale is logarithmic, or similar. If so, it means that it takes a lot more additional PageRank for a page to move up to the next PageRank level that it did to move up from the previous PageRank level.


And from Wikipedia

PageRank results from a "ballot" among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it ("incoming links"). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page.

Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each webpage on the Internet; this PageRank denotes a site’s importance in the eyes of Google. The PageRank is derived from a theoretical probability value on a logarithmic scale like the Richter Scale. The PageRank of a particular page is roughly based upon the quantity of inbound links as well as the PageRank of the pages providing the links. It is known that other factors, e.g. relevance of search words on the page and actual visits to the page reported by the Google toolbar also influence the PageRank.


Log scales are not linear. From Wikipedia:

A logarithmic scale is a scale of measurement that uses the logarithm of a physical quantity instead of the quantity itself.
A simple example is when equally-spaced divisions on the vertical axis of a chart are labelled 1, 10, 100, 1000, instead of 1, 2, 3, 4.


So, a PR4 has 1000 times the weight of PR1 (not pr2 like I said above)

"Links are important, but only if from higher ranking sites." Again, incorrect. What is your obsession with page rank? Unfortunately many webmasters get obsessed with page rank, forgetting that page rank is just a number. Sure it's nice to have a high PR, but it does not say where you will appear on the SERPs (search engine result pages), because it is not related. All quality links are important - but the key is quality and relevancy.

I made that statement to help steer the readers of this forum, most who are very non-technical, into wasting their valuable time and business focus on building link swap pages.

Granted a more accurate statement would be "All links are good (as long as they are not from linkfarms), but a link from a more authorative site, all other things being equal, carries more weight"

And PageRank is not the only consideration either. It used was to demonstrate a point.

The SERP (Search Engine Results Page) is the actual result returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The SERP consists of a list of links to web pages with associated text snippets. The SERP rank of a web page refers to the placement of the corresponding link on the SERP, where higher placement means higher SERP rank. The SERP rank of a web page is not only a function of its PageRank, but depends on a relatively large and continuously adjusted set of factors,[9][10] commonly referred to by internet marketers as "Google Love"[11]. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is aimed at achieving the highest possible SERP rank for a website or a set of web pages.



The tool I rely on when I do research to see if I can get a site into the top 10 on Google is Market Samurai.

Here are the top on-page and off-page elements they show for each of the top 10 organic search results in Google for any give keyword phrase:

On Page

• Keyword in Title
• Keyword in URL
• Keyword in description
• Keyword in Header tags

Off Page Elements

• Domain Age
• Page Rank
• Page Backlinks
• Domain Backlinks
• .edu or .gov backlnks
• DMOZ directory listing
• Yahoo directory listing

These elements give an accurate enough picture to determine if the battle for a top 10 spot is winnable and how easy/hard it will be.

What I notice most often, is how few people have done the 4 simple on page optimization factors. So, link pages are in fact a waste of time if the page isn't optimized for a keyword phrase.

EXAMPLE: a quick look at the phrase "self hypnosis class San Francisco" shows the following:

Note how the top 10 results have no on page SEO. This would be an easy battle to win. If hypnotists want to rank high, they need to start with the on page elements and provide good keyword relevant content first. Then worry about links.

Finally, anyone reading this who wants to learn how to rank well for niche markets, I recommend you go do the free training from Ed Dale and the folks at the Thirty Day Challenge. One of the best educations in online market research, how to test a market, SEO, and PPC all for free. You just need to put the time in to make it work.

Cheers,

Craig

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