Affordable SEO Pt #5 - Inbound Linking The Right Way
There was a time back in the dark old days of Internet optimization (like 2 years ago), when webmasters simply gathered as many inbound links as possible - and I’m talking about any old links. Link farming was almost the status quo, if you can believe that. Webmasters would gather inbound links by the hundreds every month from web sites that had nothing in common with their own.
It worked very well too - if you could recruit over 1000 inbound links to your site, you could rank very high in the search engines. (especially Google). But that game is all over now, and if you are still doing that kind of linking your site has likely been punted from Google, and perhaps MSN as well. The game has changed dramatically, so I want to update some of the new players who might be reading this.
The kind of linking you need to do is what I call “natural linking” - meaning the procurement of inbound links that makes sense to the search engine algorithms. Try to only add a handful of good links to your site per month. 5-10 inbound links every month will do fine. Below is my definition of a “good link”.Â
Definition of a good link:
a) An inbound link from a pagerank (PR) of 3 or higher
b) An inbound link from a page that is on topic with your web site or blog  Â
Avoid linking with sites that have nothing to do with yours. This a sure fire way to get Google’s shirt in a knot. They’ll penalize you for that kind of linking, so don’t be tempted to load up on inbound links with some kind of fancy software or script. Just be natural about it.
You must be sure not to add other sites by large numbers per month, or harvest inbound links in droves every month. Google sees that as “unatural linking” as well.
The best way to get unbound links is slowly, and from other bloggers or webmasters that are pointing out your content to their visitors. This is a very natural process, and the search engines will love your site or blog for it. Â
