10 Golden Rules to Linking

[Mike12345]

What would you guys say the 10 Golden Rules to linking are?
Like a kind of guide to efficient webmaster friendly linking.

What are the DO's and Dont's to linking?

Any offerings?

:)

[le_gber]

link to relevant site/pages inside a site

use appropriate anchor text for the link

link to site that you can trust (you have checked and they don't use spammy tech)

one way link are better (if the link is TO your site)

linking to notorious people (high PR) in your field MAY be beneficial

anybody else?

leo

<edited>typos + 'notorious people' explained</edited>

[edited by: le_gber at 3:04 pm (utc) on April 11, 2003]

[brotherhood of LAN]

linking out
-whichever way you link, make sure there's an easy way to track them, i.e. 404 city
-for the one's that are not 404, worth taking a peak/spider to see that it's the same content.
-link to lots of sites with high PR, lots of backlinks, or generally appear on all the SERP's you wish to be in (on topic of course ;o))

[robertito62]

avoid closed circles. Like BOL said, link out.

Closed circles hoard page rank. Not good. Selfishness.

Other terms I came across when investigating this: dead leaf, subgraph and link sink. More experienced board members feel free to correct me.

[edit_g]

I'm going to drop the proverbial bomb here:
Don't link out! Just don't do it.

[paynt]

Hang on edit_g, we're soon going to have a whole conversation on that so let us not get distracted from the topic. I want to talk about this edit_g, really.

[robertito62]

can't wait paynt, have to answer...

edit_g,
sure it might be better in the near term but if my interpretation of some of the papers that are out there is correct, preserving PR this way might create a series of problems search engines need to avoid in order to provide better SERPS, like avoiding infinite loops.

[Oaf357]

Never robots.txt or nofollow a page with links on it. It's just rude.

[paynt]

I did start it robertito62 at,

Reasons Not To Link
Standing alone? [webmasterworld.com]

I forgot to come back here and let you all know. edit_g did let me know there will be further comment in that discussion to follow so keep an eye open.

[Mike12345]

Its all good so far :)

Has anyone got anymore to add? It would be much appreciated.

What about the effective use of in/cross site links? How much can that help/hinder us?