Forum Moderators: martinibuster
He's been adding links for 10 years, and has 10's of thousands of links. Since he is a professor, I assume it is a non-commercial site with quality information that lends itself to being linked to.
My suggestion is to create killer content, then get 3 links a day for the first year, 10 links a day the second year, 20 links a day the third year, and so on for the next 10 years you are sure to become the top ranked authority site for whatever subject matter you wish.
Getting people to link to you (getting inbound links) is what most helps you to rank. It's important what the links say, where they're coming from, and what your site says too.
Think of links as references. In the real world, if someone is looking for an "art history professor," and lots of people recommend him as an art history professor, then those references will help in that search for an art history professor.
Links work like references on the web. There are about a hundred other factors too that Google assesses when it ranks a site.
There's also the question of what searches the site ranks for. If it ranks just for "professor," that's pretty amazing. If it's #1 for "art history professor," that is less amazing, but it's still an impressive accomplishment.
On the other hand, if it just comes up #1 for the professor's name and his name is unusual, that's not a major feat. If his name is "John Smith," then he's done pretty well.
Outbound links are a whole different thing. I've seen people build such impressive collections of links on their sites that people link to them because the collections are so useful... and that can also cause a site to rank. In that case, the links are the content of the site, which is a whole other dimension of site ranking.
Is it ok to mention products on this site that address a posted question?
Art
I've read in Google's Directions that they don't like more than 100 links/page
It's a recommendation only. I've seen people with thousands of links on a page get crawled. Personally though I'll keep external links somewhere between 30-50. Unless you know what you are doing, or are willing to accept the consequences, I'd follow the recommendation.
What if? I were to add non reciprocal links that are relative to my site "art" and work my way up to the tens of thousands of links like he has done?
Unless you are going to pay for the large amounts of links then this is the only way.
Sounds like the guy runs a site that is a links directory for art history and a very useful one at that if he has thousands of relevant links in it.
