Gadooney.com

Much ado is made about links to and from websites. And rightfully so, as they play a role in how highly your site and pages are ranked in search engines and can serve as a traffic source. But there’s also a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding regarding links, and many people waste far too much time obsessing over links when they first start out.

Links to your site (otherwise known as incoming links) are a good thing. A very good thing. But all links aren’t created equal, and many people waste a lot of time at the beginning of their affiliate careers worrying far too much about getting incoming links.

The biggest waste of time are reciprocal links, and people who expend much energy trying to get them. People find similar sites, dig up a contact email for the webmaster, and send an email saying “If you add a link to my site on your links page, I’ll add a link to your site on mine, and whee, we’ll both win!”

Except, well, no, no you won’t. Search engines are moving away from attaching much value at all to links like this, as they’re smart enough these days to see the artificial nature of the reciprocal link. In the past that wasn’t the case, so search engines saw any incoming link to your site (including reciprocal links) essentially as a vote of popularity, counting all links in your favor as a sign that you have a popular, useful site that should be ranked highly in search results.

But that’s changed, and the search engine algorithms now severely devalue reciprocal links. They’re artificial and not a sign of overall worthiness of the site. Lots of reciprocal links usually only signify that the owner is trying to manipulate search results.

Note, though, that I’m only talking about reciprocal links here, where two sites agree to add links to one another in a fairly artifical fashion. Incoming links to your site in general are very, very important, and will be the topic of much future discussion here.

There are also outgoing links, which are links from your site to other content out there on the Web. If used in moderation, these are fairly neutral, as far as value to you and your site. Keep in mind that any external link is a potential traffic suck, as the surfer may click on that link and never return to your site. But don’t be scared to include external links, especially if the links are useful to surfers.

The last type of link are internal links, which are links you create yourself that link to other content on your site. It’s a good idea to get in the habit of providing lots of internal links, as it not only helps search engines find all the pages on your site and index them, but it’s a good practice in general, as it helps surfers navigate your site as well.