South West eCommerce

You've heard us say it many times before - increasing the amount of web sites that link into yours is very important for search engine ranking.

Search engines take notice of the number of sites that link to yours, and also their importance. The more important or large sites you have pointing to your web site, especially if they are related to yours in subject matter, the more important your site will seem to the search engines, and the higher they will rank you.

For example, the more gardening sites you have pointing to your web site, the more the search engines will think your site is about gardening, so the higher your site will appear when people are searching for gardening related products.

This is something that has been known for a long time, and in response people have sought ways to increase the number of links pointing to their web site - sometimes artificially.

But search engines are pretty clever at working out who is linking to your site, and whether those links are genuine or not. For example, if you've joined some kind of "link club", where everybody links to everyone else just to raise the number of links, most of the search engines are clever enough to work that out, and may reduce the "importance" they place on those links.

With people coming up with new ways all the time to artificially increase their link popularity, search engines change the way they view particular links. For example, for some time now most search engines have placed less importance on a reciprocal link (seen as a general link swap) than a one way link (seen more as a genuine link that is worth something).

What does all this mean? As a long term strategy you should consider "mixing up" your incoming website links a bit. Try to arrange links to your website where you don't link back. Create a few blog posts with links in them to your site. Create some forum posts with your links in them. Maybe do some article marketing or post your link in various social bookmarking sites. By mixing it up as much as possible, not only does it look more natural to the search engines, but you're spreading your risk. If Google decides one day that it's going to ignore blog comments for link popularity purposes, your site will still have a broad spectrum of links from various places to hold it's link popularity.