How Inbound And Outbound Links Raise Your Site’s Visibility While you want to get your web site indexed in as many search engines as possible, there is no doubt that getting indexed by Google should be your top priority. Many web site owners make a good share of their money from visitors who find their site from a link in Google. It’s not only important that your site be found in Google, it’s important where your site is in Google’s Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). Unless you’re at or near the top, you’re not going to get as much traffic. So, how does your site work its way towards the top in Google? By raising your Page Rank (PR) PR is calculated number generated by a secret Google algorithm that determines how “important” Google thinks you page is in relationship to other pages that are in the same category as yours. When calculating PR, Google looks at how many pages link to yours and how important those pages are. These links are called Inbound Links (IBL) because they point in to your pages. The theory is that if an important page is linking to your page then your page must be important as well. Google calls this “casting a vote” for your page. The more votes that are cast, the more important your sites appears and the better your PR gets. This is referred to as Link Popularity. The Google PR scale runs from 0 to 10. These are referred to by letters “PR” followed by the number. PR0, PR1, etc.Although your site’s PR isn’t the only factor that determines where you will appear in the SERP, it is an important one.Not all links are considered when Google is calculating your PR. For example, there are certain link farms, sites that exist solely to create links, which Google ignores.Google also has flagged certain sites as being in “bad neighborhoods” and, if you link your pages to those sites, it can actually hurt you PR. Google realizes that you have no control over who links TO your site, so links that point to your pages from those bad neighborhoods are simply ignored. Generally, if a site has a PR of “0”, you don’t want to link to it. The key to getting a good PR is to acquire links from other sites that have a PR that is at least equal to yours if not higher. But not just any link will do. Google is also starting to pay attention to the content on the IBR pages. If it is determined that the content on the page providing the IBL has no relationship to the content on your page it will be ignored. If Google detects a pattern of this on your site, you could end up getting penalized and perhaps losing your PR altogether. Because it takes so much time to find content-related sites that have good PR and arrange a linking agreement, webmasters are turning to automated link exchanges to do the hard work. These exchanges work by pre-registering webmasters who are willing to exchange links with other related sites. When you join you simply provide some basic information about your site and its category and our automated link exchange service does the rest. You end up with potentially hundreds of quality sites linking to yours, and your PR goes up as a result! |