Links from great sites - but where to place them?!

[James_WV]

Hi Everyone,

So, I'm in the business of selling widgets all over the world, so I have different pages on my site for location A widgets, location B widgets etc.

I've been doing a bit of research for some good links - I've found a series of sites all by the same company - essentially destination guides for location A, location B etc. All separate domains.

All of these domains rank very highly for some seriously competitive phrases - i.e. "location A" with 23,000,000 results. They all have good Page Rank. They all get good traffic. They all have less than 50 outgoing links on each page.

I can get permanent links from these sites - i.e. location A site to my location A page. Only trouble is I have two options:

1) Link in left hand nav bar, will appear on every page.
2) Link will appear in a small box out within the home page content

Which do you think is the best? I'm thinking nav bar, would I be correct?

[CainIV]

I prefer links in content, as far away from paid link land as possible:)

Even links that are traded fairly and benefit both sides can look suspicious on the homepage especially if the box or table is marked.

Often a deep page that has quality links to it can be a great bet :)

[tedster]

Also, i believe there was a moment where blogroll links were causing some false flags in Google's spam detection. That is fixed now, but from what I can see blogroll links (any kind of run-of-site links) are not even worth one solid content area link these days.

[MLHmptn]

I second what CainIV and Tedster have given you. In-content links RULE! Link exchange pages, sidebar and footer links have been devalued tremendously for some time now. Get a link from the on-topic sites inner linked page and exactly as CainIV has said, if it has some quality links to that inner page but very little links going out your link will get some sure juice for it just as tedster has pointed out as well.

But if you cannot get in-content links, your best bet in my opinion would be option 1. Left hand nav bar as long as the site's entirety is on-topic and if your talking locations it would be a safe bet if your site would be about travel or something of the sort to all of those locations. Right-side your going to get tagged as advertisement, paid links, etc. and devalued.

Of course this is only my opinion but I stand true to my words. Been here, done that, good luck. It's honestly sad the links I turn down now that only two years ago I would have begged to have. If it's not related, it's not on my websites period and we do not do link exchange/resources pages. If it's not entirely on-topic and in-content I do not exchange links, bottom line. Google loves it and why shouldn't they, they don't want to point their results to any sort of site that say for instance is about "Rome, Italy" and find viagra linked sites, or car parts, or for that matter anything off-topic.

HTH!

[idolw]

depends on the site's current backlink profile. if you already have a bunch of good natural backlinks you can try the navi bar with target anchor to get some boost. if your site is new and does not have at least a few hundred good links, I would go for single links within content so they look natural.

[James_WV]

Thanks for all your advice everyone.

My site currently has quite a good backlink profile. The site I'm getting the links from is completely on-topic and they have very few outgoing links - and the ones they do have are also highly related. (Absolutely no off-topic links at all - the sites are all VERY clean)

I'll try and get the in-content links, but I don't think the webmaster's going to be up for that - although that would definitely be my preference.

MLHmptn - "Left hand nav bar as long as the site's entirety is on-topic and if your talking locations it would be a safe bet if your site would be about travel or something of the sort to all of those locations." - You hit the nail on the head in all respects - that's why although I'd prefer an in-content link I think these would be good for us...