I sound like a broken record as I harp on about the importance of links, but I just want to clarify some very important issues with links that have been effecting so many of your web rankings in the past few months. Many sites have seen a decline in their search engine rankings - yet they have lots and lots of links, why?

As I said in a post last month about the Importance of Links Google has long disapproved of reciprocal links and now they have pounced “bad neighbourhood” links and buying links.

A bad neighbourhood is formed when you have lots of links from sites that have nothing to do with your sites content. Links from fashion websites, car sales, even shoe websites pointing to your hotel or travel site. Google simply sees right through this and simply not counting these links. It has not been established as yet whether your site is also being penalised for actually having these links. Likewise, listing you site on link farms (sites that serve no other purpose than creating links), or the most recent fad of three-way link schemes are definitely heavy frowned upon - they are simply cheating!

Worse, for hostels that have got themselves listed in such sites, I foresee it is going to be one hell of a battle to get yourselves removed.
Also in a post last month I introduced you to a cool tool for looking to the anchor text links of your competitors for your selected keywords. The anchor and title texts in the links to your website are very important. As part of the clampdown on rogue linking Google is placing much greater emphasis on the relationship between the content on your site and the content on the sites linking to you. One of the main methods for doing this is by looking at the title and anchor text in the links. The back link tool I gave you earlier this week is the first place to start in analysing your links and those of your competitors to establish the value of these.

Since Google has introduced these changes many established sites have seen themselves fall down the ratings. On the flip side the opportunity exists for you to improve your rankings now.

Tags: links, search engines, SEO

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 9:46 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.