paynt - 10:48 pm on Jun 14, 2001 (gmt 0)

Thanks Budterm, for bringing the question to the forum. I’ve been giving my link strategies a lot of thought lately so I welcome the opportunity to talk a bit more about them.

To answer your question, yes that is how I have been working my linking and it’s been very successful. The key point that I doubt I’ll ever change is having more than one link page, connected to it’s themed counterpart. Although it’s not been the case until recently I am now concentrating on not allowing any of my link pages to run over 40 links. Why? I think if I can find 40 high quality link partners for each themed page, I’m doing pretty well. I also believe that the more links on a page the less punch they carry.

While we’re looking at it, who actually benefits from that page? The people the links lead to, obviously. It’s a courtesy we offer in exchange for a similar link. To capture the last part of your question, I would much prefer and I believe that it works more in my benefit, if people will add a link to my site from a non-link page on their site. If fact, if we’re thinking Google and I believe many of us are, then the best page that someone can link to me from is one that has a high page rank, is within a complimentary theme as my own and has very few outgoing links on it. It can be really ugly to clutter a page with reciprocal links so I would definitely save these for special link partners.

Having said that I still believe we need these link pages. Why not just have the link partners link back directly to the link page itself? Well, that isn’t going to help me unless I’m trying to build the weight of the link page up and I would prefer that they don’t get much notice. I certainly don’t want someone’s first visit to my site to be on my link page. If it does happen, and it does, I want the first link they see to lead them to the main themed page they are looking for. This could be a www page, a canonical or a sub page.

To sum this up, as it pertains to my strategy Budterm, the ultimate is the link coming in from a highly ranked page, within the theme, that has very few links on it. How realistic is this or how possible is what you make of it. I really think these links are partnerships and they're only going to become more important. The better you build your site as a whole will offer you more opportunities for the best of the possible partnerships. I think hubs help make the site more appealing.

Thanks for the question. I hope people feel welcome to express their own ideas and strategies here.