Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Hi
I have some SEO (i.e. PageRank) questions:
One of my clients is a golf course website in Scotland.
1. If my client website were to 'swap links' with 'almost every other golf course website in Scotland' - (of which there must be say 200 or so golf courses) would this:
a) Give my client website an increased competitive SEO advantage over the other clubs? (most of whom presumably wouldn't have bothered) OR
b) Get my client hammered by Google for setting up a 'link farm' ? (!)
2. Is it better when swapping links to deep link or link to the home page.
And is there any advantage of doing so asymmetrically - i.e. it is better
for our site if we to deep link, but have the other sites link to our home page?
3. If ALL golf courses were to link to all golf courses, would that help all their PageRanks ?
4. Do the links need to be in the top half of the page?
5. Is there a maximum number of links allowed on one page?
- Any advice appreciated!
Ship
Shiperton Henethe
From a business perspective the course is in a remote location, and so visitors would normally be holiday makers who often would be doing a tour of the extended area.
b)Google should be fine with this, each golf course will be hosted separate (different ip) so should be ok.
2)From a link juice point of view, you want people to hit your home page, but again you have to think about the content. What is the link going to do. i.e List of golf courses in your area <link>, then yes link to the home page.
3) Would help pagerank, but again links have to be worth while links, to get the best out them.
4) No links do not have to be in the top half of the page. You could have them in a sidebar. Try not to have all the links in the footer looks very spam like.
5)No, but you have to remember that when you page has a great number of links it have have trouble getting fully
spidered by the Search engines. If the site is not fully spidered it can influence trust of the site.
I hope this helps in some why.
If your client wants a section of their site to be full of golf course links it might be time to move that project off-site. Create a new paid directory and add the golf courses to it, in return perhaps the other owners would link to your sites index page.
I have some SEO (i.e. PageRank) questions
This tickled me. Don't be obsessed with Pagerank. Position in SERPS is more important. Only webmasters care about PR.
That said, I see nothing wrong in your ideas. The key is to do what comes naturally. Link to relevant and related sites, and if you get backlinks then great.
Whether your visitors decide to go to that site and then spend money with them is another matter altogether.
1) It would be good to have links on top half of the page.
2) Yes there should be no more than 50 links on single page.
3) Yes it will increase your page rank.
I think this would actually add nice value to the site for your visitors. I know I would like it myself if I found a golf site and had all the courses located by city on a nice map.
Then try as best you could to get the other sites to link to your site using your preferred anchor text.
The ones that won't link to your site just add a no follow to the link.
Be sure to create your own guide to the local area and list everything local in it except your competitors. Develop a brilliant link strategy for your local guide and follow through with it.
By the way, it might not be a good idea to discuss your client's business on a public forum. Next time don't use so many specifics, can get embarrassing [seroundtable.com], plus business strategy should be considered private. In the future members may want to use phrases like Local Centered Vacation Business. But what's done is done.
Good luck,
mb
For a leasure based site that I ran until last month I viewed links on the basis of the natural traffic that they would generate and SEO pretty well took care of itself.
Examples:
Looking for nice hotel - wow, golf course nearby too, perfect holiday.
Looking for a golfing holiday, nice course, what are the hotels like?
