mklink.com

[chrisbrook]

What's the situation with incoming links and Google? I don't quite understand it. What's good and what's not?

[admin]

The type and quality of incoming links that your pages basically help Google to rank one page above another for certain phrases, or in some cases to look unfavourably on pages that appear less 'trustworthy'. Basically a good number of Good quality incoming links can help to improve a page's Google PageRank. The higher the PageRank number, the more relevant and important a page is as far as Google is concerned, and the more likely it is to appear higher in search results. Good quality links are ones that provide relevant 'context' i.e. relevant key phrases to your page are in the anchor text, and the pages they come from contain relevant content generally, have reasonable Google PageRanks themselves, and don't have too many other links (especially irrelevant ones) coming out of them. Google seems to like links from genuine, good quality directories that have some kind of editorial oversight. Google appears to be less trusting of pages which have lots of paid-for links from pages that don't conform to the quality measures mentioned above e.g. irrelevant links from .edu domains or link farm schemes. In short, paid-for links don't always help, and can cause problems. For example, if a very large number of links were suddenly added, all using the same key phrase in the anchor text, Google could become 'suspicious' of your page, and this could lead to a fall in rankings. Google likes to see natural patterns in things e.g. your incoming links. Naturally, incoming links would probably contain a variety of (hopefully) related terms, based around the main subject of your page. Google would probably argue that providing plenty of good quality, interesting, useful, original content to your pages, updated on a regular basis, would in itself be a great way of attracting natural, high value links.

[ThomThomGroup]

I have been told, regarding link exchanges/reciprocal links, that google will penalise your website if you have more than 50 on a page.
can anyone confirm that?

[ThomThomGroup]

plus, can you get around that by having multiple pages for reciprocal links, or will Google detect that?

[admin]

Hi. The thing to remember about links is that Google treats them all the same, so the same 'rules' apply. Having lots of outgoing links on a page or lots reciprocal links (which will means lots of outgoing links anyway) isn't likley to get your page penalised, but it will just bring the 'value' of the pass-along PageRank down. For example, if you simply have a long page of links and you provide a link to someone else's page from that link, Google will assume that is a less valuable / less important link than if you had just a few links on your links page. With reciprocal linking, the basic idea is that you're making as many links out from a page as you're getting links in to that page. That's going to mean less importance for your page in the 'eyes' of Google than if you had lots of links coming in to a page but very few links going out. Rather than penalise pages for links or certain numbers of links as such, Google's link algorithm (which changes 300 to 400 times per year!) has been gradually moving to regard certain types of links as less valuable e.g. paid for links that lack relevance, links form link farms and linking schemes etc. Ultimately though, quality not quantity is the most important thing to Google about links. Incoming links should have a good context - a high degree of relevance and be from pages that are 'important' i.e. in terms of PageRank. Incoming links should come from pages where there is a high degree of relevance between the text content of that page and your own. The anchor text (the actual blue link) from a page to yours should contain a key phrase that is highly relevant to your page (rather than just 'click here'). The page that links to yours should ideally have a reasonable Google PageRank. The page that links through to yours should have as few as possible other outgoing links on it (and hopefully have a combination of the other points I've mentioned). I've heard the figure 100 mentioned before for the amount of links a page could have before it doesn't really pass on any real value to yours as an incoming link - I'm not sure how true this is now, but the figure does have some basis in Google's past and it's server capacity at the time.