Forum Moderators: martinibuster
If you have a nonprofit - for fun website then I can see the point.
But if you have a commercial site then the last thing I want to do is link off the site - why let a customer get away and see something else?
Even if I find a really good article on a topic related to my website I still would never link to it - as it is better then mine - so how do I benefit, I would be more likely to rewrite the article and put a new version on my own site.
As far as I can see the only honest reason to link on a commercial site is because Google likes it and no other.
Am I missing something?
People just don't link to places like Office Max...
Yahoo shows 72,000 sites [search.yahoo.com] linking to Office Max, and they're not all affiliate sites either. ;)
Get to work!
On the flip side my own small amount of link building has had some good results. There is a site that traded a large number of links on thier products and I did the same. Its along the lines of Rae's example. I talk about and review the apples and they have info on the apples that I dont... together we are a complete resource. Plus the inbound links were nice but real bonus is that the site tends to be in my top 10 of traffic generators.
I understand this philosophy and agree with it in certain situations. With new visitors (especially those from PPC or other paid sources), the last thing I want to enable them to do is continue browsing related topics on someone else's site.
However, returning visitors have demonstrated a commitment to your site and will likely return again -- even if you make it very easy for them to go somewhere else right now.
In short, don't place external links on your landing pages or other pages that are common entry points for first-time visitors. If you have areas that are primarily visited by veteran users, then links to respected sites can only be a good thing.
Martinbuster lists all those sites linking to Officemax - how many would there be if Google was neutral on links - the first page I looked at contains links from a cheap mortage site - relevant - not way.
The whole linking strategy is obviously clouded by the search engines view of it, without it then I think 90% of the internet's linkage would die overnight - worth thinking about, and possibly not a bad thing...
I do believe that there was linking going on prior to search engines. How else did you navigate the web?
I can distinctly remember using Yahoo, which didn't crawl the web at that time, to look for sites with good lists of links. It was the only way to find anything.
Alta Vista usually returned porn sites for the first two listings on any search term. Finding real and useful sites generally involved surfing from one site's link page to another and on and on.
Finding a site with a long links page was gold.
In the music business there is massive interlinking between magazines, radio stations, bands, venues, music stores, studios and independent record labels. From my site stats these relationships are as important as Google.
