Links Pages – Good or Bad?

This post has been reworked, resurfaced, and regurgitated for your perusal. Enjoy!

In recent years, a lot of people have battled over whether or not having a “Resources” page on your site is going to help you with search engine rankings at all. People have come up with varied ideas to make them work better, like doing 3-way links (site A links to site B, site B links to site C, site C links to site A) instead of reciprocal links (sites A and B link to each other). There’s even a theory that involves interlinking between 4 or more pages… oh wait, wouldn’t that be easier if you just went out after natural links? Hmm, oh yes, that it would.

“Reciprocal linking” was a strategy heavily used for many years in an effort to get links. At one point, people didn’t even care about relevance. These were link farms of the worst nature. Your site would be listed on a page with all sorts of questionable, unrelated content. Your baby clothes web site link would be sandwiched between a link for Ephedra and one for adult toys. It took an overwhelming amount of effort to clear out your inbox from all the junk every day, to get even one halfway decent link offer.

After that, the thing was “directory pages” where a site based say, on computers, would offer a page on hardware, a page on software, one on peripherals, one for programmers, another for web designers, and so on. They were still going for “more is better”, but were finally recognizing the importance of relevance. Despite the fact that there are still people doing this, with the advent of blogging and article repositories, reciprocal link exchanges are pretty much a thing of the past for most SEOs.

It’s still quite important to get good, relevant links to your site of course. But the fact remains that the more you can vary the techniques used on your site, the better. This means you should have a goal of doing many different things on your site by way of linking. For these examples, the practices remain the same no matter what your site’s about, but for example’s sake, we’ll assume you have a site that sells baking and cooking utensils.

• Link subpages to subpages when doing a reciprocal whenever possible. Ask the person if they wouldn’t mind liking to your page on egg beaters rather than to the main page of your site, and tell them that you’ll link to their recipe for western omelettes from your egg beaters page. Or, better yet: Ask them if they’ll link to your page on egg beaters from their western omelettes page, and tell them that you’ll link to their recipe on cheesecake from your page about springform pans.
• Make sure that every link you get is a relevant one. (This shouldn’t even have to be stated, but unfortunately, there are still some people who believe that any link is a good one.) If you sell baking supplies, don’t get a link going with an ED pill site. Plain and simple.
• You can also be skillful in placing links out within your content. Write an article about using your baking supplies, and link out to dessert recipe sites. It’s likely that without asking, they’ll give a link back to you. Again, don’t overdo it… no more than one link for every other paragraph or so.
• Create and maintain a blog. This is similar to the last point in terms of handing out links and getting them in return. Your blog can host the articles mentioned above, recipes (if you’re a bakeware site, or even a candymaker, cake decorator, etc.), news about your company, press releases, contests, and so much more. Draw your inspiration from other blogs in your field. Subscribe to related blog feeds in your industry, and read them in your reader like the newspaper. Find something relevant, link to it and publish your own commentary or opinion on the topic. It’s really not all that difficult. One can spend less than an afternoon drafting posts for a week or more, and then just a little while each day fine tuning and publishing. (In case you’re on the edge about blogging, Rand illustrates the many reasons why you should blog quite well.)
• And of course, don’t forget the free directories. These can be invaluable when it comes to link popularity, but even for the ones that don’t affect it, it can help boost traffic. You never know what kind of search engine/directory John Doe uses… just be cautious of “directories” that use cgi redirects – they do NOTHING for you. And don’t waste time on this one… a dozen or so new ones a few times a year is fine.