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Every Web site needs links, but how well do you understand why your site needs them? The World Wide Web is, of course, built from the linking relationships between Web documents. Links are the glue that bind all Web documents together in a collective representation of human knowledge, opinion, humor, and propaganda.
Search engines such as Ask, Google, MSN, and Yahoo! use links to find documents across the World Wide Web. They rely more upon linkage than upon document owner submission because many documents are intended only to serve as deceptive advertising. The advertisers include popular expressions on their pages but promote products or services that are unrelated. The search engine designers believe that such documents are less likely to be linked to by more open, honest documents.
People have come to expect useful Web documents to provide links to other documents. Such links confirm sources of information and opinion, provide guidance to additional information and resources on interesting topics, and serve as endorsements and testimonials about other documents or their creators. Third-party testimonials help to validate Web documents for the search engines. They rely upon such testimonials to identify legitimate, useful, informative, and entertaining content.
How the search engines crawl the Web is not well documented. It is generally believed, because of a number of technical papers and patent applications that have been reviewed and discussed by search engine optimizers, that the major search engines probably mainain very secret core indexes of highly trusted Web pages. By starting their crawls from these highly trusted Web pages, the search engines should find more legitimate documents and fewer deceptive documents. Hence, the more links that point to a given document, the more likely (and frequently) the document will be crawled.
In April 2001, Talentless Hack Adam Mathes coined the expression Google bombing on his now defunct blog. Mathes had noticed that when a lot of blogs link to a particular page with the same anchor text, Google gave that page a high ranking for the expression in the anchor text. This practice works with other search engines, and is now better known as link bombing. It has become the foundation of the majority of search engine optimization efforts largely because of the poor analysis of what happened.
In February and March 2002, John Hiller of Microcontent News immortalized Mathes' inappropriate conclusion in Google (Hearts) Blogs - How Weblogs Influence A Billion Google Searches A Week and Google Time Bombs - Will Weblogs blow up the world's favorite search engine?. On the basis of the misunderstandings in these and other articles, search engine optimizers around the world began manipulating inbound linkage to point to their sites with uniform anchor text.
Weblogs are just Web sites. Their links don't matter any more than do the links on static Web pages like this one. SEOs correctly understood that links could be used from any source to bomb pages to their top of search engine results. In fact, organized reciprocal linking had been doing just that since 1999 -- although at the time the Inktomi search engine (which then powered more than 30 other search engines, and which is now part of Yahoo!) was the primary target of the link farming technologies developed by SEOs.
Link anchor text has been used to propel unsuspecting Web sites to top rankings for misaligned pejorative expressions such as miserable failure. Some people also insist that it is possible to Google bowl a Web document by directing a large number of links from disreputable Web sites at the document and similar documents. Google bowling has never been proven to work, but the concept involves poisoning the reputation of a collection of Web documents in Google's index by making it seem as though they are part of a much larger collection of documents that are disreputable.
"It is better to give than to receive" is a philosophy that has long been overlooked by search engine optimizers. Linkage is viewed as a means to an end, rather than as a useful part of the Web's structure. When used appropriately, however, links help Webmasters, surfers, and search engines. Everyone benefits. One of the long-overlooked factors of search engine optimization is the power of outbound linkage.
Outbound links tell the search engines what documents your document associates itself with. If your document is relevant to "dog biscuits", it follows that your document will probably link to other documents concerned with "dog bisuits". Outbound links also tell the search engines which words you feel are important concerning the topics of those other documents. Your outbound link anchor text should be considered as more relevant to your document's content than, say, the other unemphasized text on the document.
Many SEOs have long believed (incorrectly) that links are differently based on where they are found. That is, the links you provide in your own documents to each other on your site may not be as helpful as links other people's documents point toward your documents. In fact, your own links are not seen any differently from other documents' links. Furthermore, how your link to your own documents tells a search engine which pages you consider to be the most important. If you have documents that only link out, and have no inbound links, the search engines may be right to conclude that those documents are not important. After all, even you don't feel they should be linked to by your other documents.
Links should be placed in informative textual context. Many SEOs seek out easy-to-get links, such as listings in free directories. But they are reluctantt to link back to those directories are recommend them as useful resources. After all, the directories often carry advertising intended only to benefit the directory operators and most people use the major search engines to find valuable content anyway. Truly valuable directories seek to provide as much relevant, useful information to their visitors as possible.
Regardless of whether you seek links from directories, blogs, article repositories, press release distribution services, or other Web sites, you should ensure that your links are wrapped by significant text that is relevant to the content of your documents. Those links should be treated as important and valuable information, not simply as links provided for the sake of building link popularity. Link value is more important than link popularity.
Michael Martinez has been actively publishing hypotheses and case studies about hypertext linking theory from a search engine optimizer point of view for many years. Michael's link strategy advice has been sought by companies and optimizers around the world. Learn more about hypertext linking theory from SEO Consulting. Telephone consulting is available.