It is a generally held thought that the most important factor that Google still uses to help decide where to rank your website id the number of other sites that have links to your own. Each one of these links is classed as a vote of confidence in the content that you are providing for your users. As a rule of thumb the more links that you have the higher your website will show up in Google’s search results.

There are other factors that influence the power of a link. Although a link is considered to be a vote in favour of your website not all votes are equal. Some sites are regarded as being more influential than others and a link from one of these sites is worth much more than a link from an unknown site and if a link has been bought then it can result in your website getting dropped from Google’s search results completely. The aim is to build up quality links in a natural way.

If you have a page of “useful links” on your website you may want to rethink your strategy. Google is aware that a lot of these links are reciprocal links (where you link to a site and that site links back to you) and they do not attribute much value to links on this kind of page. This is particularly true if there is very little text to accompany the link.

There is nothing wrong in having reciprocal links with another site it is more about how you have implemented those links that matters. You might want to consider asking a fellow site owner if they would like to exchange links and a carefully crafted email can help to make a positive impression and increase the likelihood that the site owner will agree to your proposition.

Link Spammer Emails

Since the start of the year I have noticed an increase in emails from people looking to build reciprocal links. The vast majority of these are what I term “link spam”, spam email whose purpose is to try to get you to add a link to their website. The content of the emails are not necessarily malicious and neither need be the sites that they want you to link to. They will offer to write an article for your website that will include between 3 and 5 links to other sites. The emails always tell you how impressed they have been with your site and how they think that your business will compliment their own. The temptation that is offered is they will be providing you with fresh content for your site at no cost. They also provide assurances that the article will be unique.

The reason that I refer to these emails as spam is that the email, when read, could apply equally to my website, any of my clients websites or your own. They never say anything along the lines of “I feel from reading your blog that you have a deep understanding of search engine optimisation and I think that you might be interested in an article I am writing about white hat SEO techniques”.  The email that you received that tells you how “impressed I have been with your site” has also been sent to hundreds, if not thousands, of other site owners. If they are prepared to send a generic email how do you know that the article that they are going to write will be unique or will it have already appeared in various formats on a dozen other websites?

There is nothing wrong with having guest posts on your blog, they can actually be very beneficial for your readers to get a slightly different perspective on things. A quality contributor is worth their weight in gold for your website Just be careful who you decide to let write content for your website as it may not be as beneficial as you first think.