Is It Ok To Ask For Links On Your Page?

[Planet13]

Hi everyone;

Does google think it is spammy to have a footer on your page that says Link To Us, and then has the code for them to copy-and-paste for a link to that page?

I know one poster on these forums who seems to do pretty well with this, but I have been warned by others NOT to do this.

Your thoughts?

[tedster]

I did a site:google.com search for the quoted phrase "link to this page" - and got 79,000 results. So Google does this for their own pages.

[goodroi]

Google tends to be fine with it. If you give away a large amount of tools or some other free offer you might have some issues.

I think a better question is will you have success with it. I have not seen many success stories.

My experience is that powerful link juice does not come easily. I generally need to take an active role in developing links to my site.

(Thanks for the catch Planet13 :))

[edited by: goodroi at 8:07 pm (utc) on Apr 2, 2011]

[Planet13]

Hi goodroi:

My experience is that powerful link juice doe...

I am guessing that you meant to say something like "doesn't come easily."

[Robert Charlton]

...the code for them to copy-and-paste for a link to that page....

The copy and paste code is one of several possible weaknesses to this approach. The cookie-cutter code is likely to result in too many links with identical anchor text. Introducing variation into your code might be one way around this, but I don't know that this is an approach that's worth that much effort.

As long as there's no quid pro quo involved in the link, I doubt that Google would feel that there's anything deceptive about the approach. In terms of intent and user initiative, "Like" and tweet buttons and various forms of social voting are very much analogous. Not all of these lead to links, of course... and not all forms of social references or links are equal.

It's likely, though, that in the overall scheme of things, copy and paste links probably won't be used by the really important sites you'd like to get links from... but it's still possible that they might lead to some links that will be helpful.

I myself don't use them, either for inbound or outbound suggestions. As you say, good links don't come easily.

[dstiles]

I block all SEs from accessing all our sites' "link to us" info pages AND the links to those pages. It's no business of any SE and it simplifies things.

On directory and other sites that accept links we only add them after viewing the sites; we then add a line in the "You are listed" email asking them, if they have a web site (not always relevant), to add a link to us if they are comfortable with doing so.

I never chase up on that: I have no idea how many links there are to any of our sites.