Don't spill your Google Juice!
I get emails on a regular basis from new websites that would like to exchange links with me. They often start by informing me how I can benefit from such a link exchange. Exchanging links with sites can be effective in getting traffic from the site linking to you but it can also suck out all your Google Juice.
Sites that are linked to from lots of other sites are regularly deemed more popular and therefore get a much higher ranking in search engine results. More important than the number of links though is the quality of those incoming links. Contacting the owners of Web sites that score highly for key phrases related to your content and asking them if they will provide a link back to your site isn’t a bad idea.
The first thing I do when I get contacted by one of these site owners is check the Page Rank of their website. If their page rank is lower than my own page rank then I know that it will most likely not be beneficial to me to exchange links with them. You could be tricky and add a rel="nofollow" tag after the link, these tags are like plugs that stop your hard earned Google Juice from flowing out of your site and into theirs.
Content within your own website should also be correctly linked together so that search engine web crawlers can follow links within your own website. If you don’t provide working links to all your pages, some of your content may not get indexed….and that’s not good.
Why pass your Google Juice on to others? pass it to pages within your own site instead with effective internal linking.
* Editor's Note: Contrary to popular belief, Google Juice is not made from freshly squeezed search engines but is high in vitamin PR.
Image by CR CC BY-SA 3.0
No comments:
Post a Comment