Sitemap sent to Google - do I still need links?

[heringslake]

Hi everybody,

i started a website and submitted the sitemap of it to google via google webmaster tools. i have several thousand pages now included in google, but no external links yet (cause i just started).

should i worry about google knowing that i have a huge website, but no links to it?

IF yes, then what can i proactively do to get links. Are directories, that link to your site any worth paying for?

thanks a lot for your help

hering

[mack]

A site can indeed get listed with little or no incoming links, it will however be extremely difficult to get the site to rank for anythign competitive. That's where the power of external links comes into a force of its own.

Think of the site map as a way of simply letting Google know where your pages are. The links count as votes, this is more or less a way of Google judging the importance of a page.

What you NEED to do is work on getting links, forget link exchanges, they aren't worth it. What you need is one way links, preferable links from pages that are in some way related to the content of your page. On topic links are far more beneficial than random links. They do count, but on topic links have far more weighting.

What you may find is your pages may drop out of the results for a while, this is quite common for sites that are fairly new and have little or no links. As you get links your site will come back stronger.

Mack.

[tedster]

We've got an entire forum here dedicated to Link Development [webmasterworld.com] - check out the Forum Library [webmasterworld.com] and other active threads there for ideas.

I see link development as a kind of marketing or public relations exercise, very similar to business networking in general. Once you've got good content, then you need to let interested people know about it. Link growth may seem slow in quantity at first, but the long term value of the quality links you do get will build you a solid web business.