Home | Internet Business | Site Promotion

Good Link - Bad Link

By: lowster11

There's a lot of discussion towards determining what constitutes a "good" link and what makes up a "bad" link. Basically, a "good" link is a link that fulfills the "quality" criteria - but this definition is a bit vague and repetitive, and
for webmasters looking to get a head-start on their link-building campaigns there is a need for more objective, verifiable methods of categorization.

Page Rank is the single most visible measure of a website's worth. Whether you are a webmaster looking for links for your website, or a professional SEO hunting links for your clients, you will invariably go for that little green bar
showing in your toolbar for every website.
The danger (and this has been documented by many elite SEO experts, most notably during the recent Page Rank "fade out" of Memorial Weekend, May 2005) is that people tend to attach far too much importance to a metric that Google has progressively given less importance to.

Today Google is implementing changes to its algorithm that tend to focus a lot more on relevancy and content quality rather than static Page Rank. Add to this, Google's internal implementation of Trust Rank, and you have a
situation where there is a lot of noise about nothing.

And yet, Page Rank remains an integral part of determining the value of a link. My advice is to definitely factor in the Page Rank but not to make it the end-all and be-all of your campaign.
Instead, use Page Rank for the following:

Determining if the website has earned any search engine penalty (greyed-out instead of a white or green bar)

Establishing a ball-park estimate of how important such a link could be for your website, provided every other factor falls into place as well.

And that is the key - Page Rank really comes into play when the following criteria (content quality, relevancy and outbound links) are satisfactorily fulfilled.

Search Engine Penalties

The most obvious reckoning that a website has suffered a search engine penalty is to monitor the Page Rank - a penalized website will have a greyed-out bar. And yet there are other types of penalties more subtle than Page
Rank.

A Sandboxed website has a soft penalty imposed on it - this will be evident if the website you see has high link popularity (large number of back links) and is a big website in terms of content, but has low search engine rankings. Such a link will still help you. On the other hand, sandboxed websites are always looking for more link exchange partners, so they will usually be more willing to exchange links.

Poor on-site and off-site optimization can drain away the website's link value. While the change may not be visible, beware of any website that has a "bad" reputation in search engines - either through spam-filled content (content
for the purpose of revenue) or because banned or other "bad" websites link to it.

It is fairly hard to spot sandboxed or penalized websites immediately. This will involve a bit of digging and background research, but is ultimately more rewarding as links from websites with low or negative link value will
badly damage your search engine rankings.

The only thing that needs to be spent some time on, is to determine whether the website is penalized or not. Everything else can be done in under a minute (total), so checking out a website for link compatibility should
not take more than 4-5 minutes in total. If you find yourself taking much more time than that, then there is obviously something wrong with your approach.

Article Source: Main Articles

Brad Callen www.seoelite.com Chris Lowry www.lowster11.com Professional SEO's

This article may be reproduced wholly or in part without written permission provided the byline, resource area, and any hyperlinks remain in order to give proper credit to the author.

Internet search engines and directory listings are imperative to your sites existence and success. Submit Your Website to the Searchen Networks directory and search engine to achieve authoritive inbound links.

Please Rate this Article

Click the XML Icon Above to Receive Site Promotion Articles Via RSS!

Additional Articles From - Home | Internet Business | Site Promotion

	Print This Article
	Post Comment
	Add To Favorites
	Email to Friends
	Ezine Ready

	Submit Articles
	Member Login
	Top Authors
	Most Popular Articles
	Submission Guidelines
	Ezine Notifications
	Article RSS Feeds

	New Stuff
	About Us
	Link to Us
	Contact Us
	Privacy Policy
	Terms of Service

:: Top Author Businesses:

Try your luck, Play BlackJack

:: Our Supporters: