One Way Links Create High Ranking Web Pages

Inbound links to your website are considered by search engines as a vote, or an acknowledgment of value and trust from those sites that link to you.

In order for that vote to really count, the site linking to you must to have a good reputation with the search engines.

The anchor text (underlined words in the link) used in the link is a valuable factor in ranking for competitive keywords in any niche. The content on the page linking to you should have some relevance to the outbound links on the page. This helps establish credibility indicating that these links provide value and are on topic and natural.

Some of the important factors for any page you plan to request a link from are listed below.

• Page is indexed by the search engines with a recent cache date (30 days or less is really good)
• Page has inbound links from other sources
• Other external links on the page are topical and are in good neighborhoods (you don't want your florist links right next to viagra and on line gambling)
• The domain hosting the page is a quality site

Truthfully, the search engines are still in the early stages of identifying topical, relevant links as opposed to link anywhere about anything type links. The important thing is that what works today may not work very well tomorrow.

So, it is important to think long term when developing a link campaign since it is difficult to undo free for all linking once you realize you have been penalized.

There are many ways to build one way links. Some of the more common methods are listed below.

• Directory submissions
• Blog comments
• Article Marketing
• Forum posts
• Social Media networking
• Press Releases
• Ebooks & Free Tools
• Newsletters
• RSS Syndication

Reciprocal links are a great way to network and feed off other sites visitors, assuming you don't reciprocate on links pages. Reciprocal links should be only a small percentage of the total links built for any site. Too many reciprocal links as a percentage of the total links on a site can cause negative ranking results with search engines.

Always make sure that reciprocal link partners are quality sites and have good linking practices with others. Work to get your reciprocal links in site content, not on links pages. The search engines will hold you accountable for who you reciprocate with.

Using Nofollow to Control Link Juice Flow

The link attribute nofollow is used widely to control comment spam and not pass reputation or link juice to 3rd party sites. Strong opinions continue to be voiced about the use of the attribute on internal links within one's site.

The concept of using nofollow on internal links is to prevent bleeding PageRank to pages that are not useful in the index and don't contain content relating to your niche. Nofollow on a link on page1 to page2 prevents page2 being crawled and eliminates passing reputation, link juice, PageRank to that page.

Other Methods

The meta robots tag is available to nofollow all links on a page. The combination index, nofollow will allow the page to be indexed but all links on the page are nofollowed, while the noindex, nofollow combination prevents indexing and nofollows all links.

Robots.txt can be used to prevent indexing and crawling the page as well using the disallow directive. While this is acceptable for contact pages, privacy policies, etc don't use this to combat duplicate content pages. Why? If a page accumulates backlinks and is not indexed then it becomes a dangling page.

A better solution for duplicate content is to use the on page meta tag noindex, follow. This allows the page to be crawled and the juice to flow out of the page. Internal links pointing to duplicate content pages can be nofollow linked to minimize PageRank flow to those pages.

Strong Opinions

Like all things SEO, strong opinions in both directions have been voiced both advocating and warning against the use of nofollow links on internal pages.

I don't think the use of nofollow on internal links is particularly helpful for smaller sites. Those sites that have hundreds of thousands of pages with navigational links to contact pages can certainly benefit from the granular use of the nofollow attribute on single links.

For blogs with duplicate content issues that are not resolvable with a plugin and site design, it is a necessity to prevent link juice leakage.

For those that warn that Google will ban you, penalize you, de-index you, and take you off their Christmas list for using nofollow on internal links read what Matt Cutts said in Google groups on October 8,2007.

Author Note:

Robert is webmaster at Website Design Elixirs providing custom website design, search engine optimization services, and custom link building.

A video by SEOmoz about link juice and linking in general.

A video by SeoBook about keyword research best practices.