How to Help Your Website growth by Properly Managing website Links
Link building is probably the most time-consuming task of an SEO. Nevertheless it’s perhaps one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization. Today we take a look at the various techniques that can be used to create and manage inbound links.
Note: I’m aware that link building isn’t exactly related to web design. But because we want to create a complete SEO Session, we have no choice but to include it.
Let’s Back up a Little
In the very first article of this Session – An Introduction to SEO – we learned how search engines work. One of the factors that search engines use in their algorithm are links. Search engines see a link to a website as a vote for that website; the more links (or votes) you get, the higher the page will rank.
It’s important to know that not all links have the same effect. Links from trustworthy sites with a high authority are more valuable than links from less established websites.
That’s why link building is an important part of search engine optimization. Links can vastly improve the performance of your website in the search results.
Let’s Back up a Little
In the very first article of this Session – An Introduction to SEO – we learned how search engines work. One of the factors that search engines use in their algorithm are links. Search engines see a link to a website as a vote for that website; the more links (or votes) you get, the higher the page will rank.
It’s important to know that not all links have the same effect. Links from trustworthy sites with a high authority are more valuable than links from less established websites.
That’s why link building is an important part of search engine optimization. Links can vastly improve the performance of your website in the search results.
Manual Link Building
The first step of manual link building is finding relevant websites. As we’ve said before; it’s best to get links from relevant, authoritative domains.
Finding these can be a bit tricky. However, there are several tools that can help you, such as the Mozbar browser plugin (Chrome / Firefox). This plugin displays the Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) in the SERPs.
Managing Your Link Profile
If you have a suspicious link profile you might get a penalty from Google. This means that your page can disappear from the search results completely. To prevent this we need to make manage our links.
Nofollow Tag
The nofollow tag tells search engines not to follow a link. This means that no PageRank is transferred to the underlying page.
You might remember the nofollow tag from our Robots.txt article. If we use the nofollow tag in the robots meta tag, Google will ignore all outgoing links on that page. However, we can also add this tag to an individual link:
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001
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<a href="http://website.com" rel="nofollow">Website</a> |
Google wants webmasters to add this nofollow tag to paid links. Paid links are a violation of Google’sWebmaster Guidelines. Besides paid links this tag can be useful for comment sections. There are plenty of spammers out there who want to build links via comments. To discourage these practices it’s best to add a nofollow tag to comment URLs.
When it comes to link building: if you were able to add a link to an external page, make sure it’s a follow-link (i.e. there’s no nofollow tag). Otherwise it won’t help you rank.
Disavow Tool
The Disavow Tool is a brand new tool that was released at the end of 2012. It can be used to remove links that point to your website. Remove is perhaps a bad choice of words – it tells Google to ignore certain links that point to your site.
This tool can be used to recover from Google’s Penguin update. Some webmasters have received an ‘unnatural link warning’ in Google Webmaster Tools due to a high amount of low quality links pointing to their site (something the Penguin update is looking for). Websites with a suspicious link profile were affected by this, often to their surprise. James Farmer from WPMU was hit by this update because he had a link in the footer of the WordPress themes he released.
Thankfully you can use the Disavow Tool to clean up your link profile. Here’s how it works:
- First you need to go to this Webmaster Tools page (you can only use this tool if you are registered as the ‘owner’ of the domain).
- Select the correct domain and click the ‘disavow links’ button.
- Select the link file (more info below) and hit the ‘submit’ button.
