Should Inound Links be On-Target to Your Website?

On-Target Links to Your Site

[amythepoet]

Hi,

I've been getting inquiries from people who want to link to me, who really are not connected to what I do. What is the feeling regardling linking to them and vice versa, Thanks.

[martinibuster]

My feeling is that if you are doing quantity of links to overcome any disadvantage the search engines may put on the links, then it may be all right. But that's a topic that can generate a lot of reasonable pros and cons.

If you aren't working the quantity angle, I would stay away from it. Just my feeling.

Anyone else have an opinion on this?

[amythepoet]

Thank you. I agree with you.

[justdave]

I would only link to said site if it is something that your visitors would find useful. If you have a site about dogs, exchanging links with a pet food site would be ok, but trading with a car parts site would probably not be advised. Of course, if they want to link to you without a rciprocal link, I don't think that would really hurt anything.

[amythepoet]

Thanks, yes, I'm going with on-target links, it makes the most sense to me.

[graywolf]

A few off topic outbounds won't be the end of the world, but off topic links should be a very small minority.

Also consider page topicality, not site topicality. If you'd really like to trade links with someone for whatever reason, why not create a page for that topic, and put the link there.

Works the other way around too, if you really want someone to trade links with you create an on topic page on your site link to them on it. Click thru a couple of times, use some proxy servers to vary the IP. The key is to get noticed in the log files. Drop them an email, include some web log stat "puffery", and ask for a link back.

[amythepoet]

Thanks, that makes sense too.