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SEO: What is link building? Ingoing links!

June 25, 2008 – 1:26 am

Link building is one of the most important parts of SEO – Search Engine Optimization. Link building is one of the facts, which give your website a better rank in search engines, but what does it mean?

Link building is not one of the fancy internet words and it is pretty easy to understand. Building links: Ingoing links and outgoing links. 

 

What is ingoing links?
Ingoing links are the fact search engines as Google measures the value of your website. If other websites have chosen to link to your website, search engines see your website to be rich on information. This is like the best way of branding, as we all know it; from mouth to ear. A potential customer has more confidence in a company, whom has been recommended from a person near to us. In this case the “Customer” is the search engine. The “Person near to us” is the website linking to your website and the “Company” is your website. The winner in this case is your website. The search engines value the recommendation (the link) and gives your website higher rank. The more ingoing links you get, the more search engines value your website = higher ranking.

Are all ingoing links valuable?
No, definitely not. Some links might even give you lower ranking. Here is a list of accepted and unaccepted ingoing links, and ingoing links of not particular value:

Which ingoing links?
- When the text that links to your website is chosen carefully and tells about your service/products. If you sell cookies in your website, then the text of the link should not be “yourwebsite.com” but “delicious cookies”. This text is called the anchor text in SEO language. This means, if a website links to you with the name of your website as the anchor text, it doesn’t have any value. All search engines will rank your website in the top, when the search is “yourwebsite.com”.

- Links from websites ranking well in searches similar to your content.

- The pagerank and the pagestrength numbers of a website linking to you, is of an important matter. And so is the lifetime of the website/domain linking to you. Pagerank and pagestrength is given to websites during some time and the higher these values are, the more search engines value them. These sites have existed for a while and links from websites will have a greater benefit for you.

- If you are able to control receiving an ingoing link from a website, make sure that it is indexed by e.g. Google. You do that by searching in Google like this: site:www.sitename.com. If the website is not indexed, then no search result will show. In this case either it is a brand new website or worse; it is banned from Google. You definitely don’t want links from those websites.

- Links from sites using redirects, rel=nofollow and JavaScript are definitely waste of time. They are harmful, but don’t have any value. Links must be linking directly to your website.

- Links from websites, with content similar to your website, are the most valuable ingoing links.

- Links from websites, that you don’t link back to, are again the most valuable ingoing links. My best advice to you is to start another serious website (C), with content subject to your main website (B). When you get a link from a link partner website (A), then you can offer a link back to B from C, never from A.
Please note that the content of website C has to be different from B. If you paste the same content from C to B, one of them will be “punished” by search engines because of duplicate content.

What is outgoing links?
Outgoing links are the links you have in your website to other websites. Outgoing links also have a big value for your website. Search engines will have a picture of your website as an informational website referring to other websites.

More about outgoing links will follow.