Links and Search Engine Optimisation

Linking is a very important area of search engine optimisation (SEO). Most websites have a 'link page'. These link pages tend not to attract many visitors but do provide a valuable service for other websites......or do they? They are mainly there because search engines like Google basically count up how many external links that point to a specific webpage and the total goes towards that webpage's page rank but how valuable are these 'link page' links? Just because a website's home page has a high page rank in Google doesn't mean to say the 'links page' has a high page rank also.

Indeed we at The Path Web Design have a theory that these links are rarely used by Google. The most valuable links are those from highly ranked pages with good, relevant and original content. A link from a page like this really is a blessing.

For example if a website or webpage is popular (Website X) and many people link to it from various other websites these external links boost Website X's organic search engine listing. That is to say they will appear higher up the search listing for the key terms provided. This is not of course the only thing that effects organic page rankings but it is definitely a very important factor.

Deep linking throughout a site from high page ranked webpages will yield better results than just links alone.

So are we to do away with link pages? Have they become useless and obsolete or have they always been so? Perhaps the strategy is to add as much original content to a link page in the hope the search engines will like what they see and rank the page.

We would advise that any link could potentially help a website's page rank as long as it is not from a site the search engines take a dim view of.

Recently (2009) Google has devalued a lot of links which has effected pagerank quite drastically in some cases. The links that have been devalued seem to be links from directories and reciprocal links. So the most powerful and respected links are one way links to your site. These are obviously the hardest to obtain and tend to happen naturally as people find your website and start to link to it from their own.

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