# To link or not to link, that is the question?



## tbiggs (Jan 26, 2007)

Hey Everyone,

People always talks about adding and trading links to and from other sites to help build your SEO, because you have to have it, otherwise no-one will find you. Why is it that sites like dirtbagclothing.com, lifeisgood.com, afflictionclothing.com, and the list goes on and on. do not have links to other sites to help build their SEO? The only possible solution that I could come up with is because they have enough money to promote themselves on a larger scale than most and don't really need to optimize. However, they had to start somewhere and if they did optimized their site in the early years (hypethetically speaking) to help with recognition, why would they not be doing it now? Are links considered trashy on a website these days?


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

> The only possible solution that I could come up with is because they have enough money to promote themselves on a larger scale than most and don't really need to optimize


That's a very good observation.

Same goes with Ford, McDonald's, etc. Those large sites don't have to worry about "search engine optimization" because they are large brands that can spend money getting their brands known.

Sites that are starting out and trying to get traffic any way they can't don't get the luxury of doing the same thing larger brands do.

When you are starting out, no one knows about you, so they won't be searching for you online by your brand name. 

You'll have to try to catch them when they are searching for the types of products you sell (funny t-shirts, fashion t-shirts, dog t-shirts, paintball is for lovers t-shirts). When they find your site through those more "generic" searches, it's then your job to impress them and make them want to find you by YOUR name.

When lifeisgood started out, nobody knew about them, and nobody searched for them online. When affliction started out, nobody knew about them, and nobody searched for them online.

However, what those 2 companies did was *build a strong brand* through _quality designs and merchandise_. That strong brand made people notice them and want to *find them*. They (in essence) _became their own keywords_!

It didn't happen overnight, but it's something that almost any business has the potential to do. It's pretty much the theme of the "Purple Cow" book by Seth Godin (from what I understand...I haven't read it all).



> People always talks about adding and trading links to and from other sites to help build your SEO, because you have to have it, otherwise no-one will find you.


Don't get too caught up in the idea of "link trading". That is a bit of an antiquated idea as far as SEO goes. 

You really want to know about SEO, read Google's help pages and it will tell you lots about how to effectively prepare your site for search engines.

It used to be that trading links could improve your search engine rankings, and it may still happen to some extent.

However, links is just one part of the SEO pie.

But to understand why it works (and why it isn't the end all to be all), you have to understand why the idea surfaced. 

In the olden days of the web, there weren't any search engines or directories to help you find things online. You just had web pages that were scattered around with no real way to find other cool websites that were out there.

So if you had a website about fly fishing in Vermont and you found other related sites about fly fishing in Vermont, you quickly added them to your own website so that others like you could easily find more information. 

It was all about helping people find the information back then.

Enter Yahoo and they created a way to categorize websites using a directory structure. That way, you could visit Yahoo, click on the Vermont category and then the fishing subcategory and see all kinds of great sites about fly fishing. Still helping people find the information.

People gave away links much more freely back then. If they found a useful site, they linked to it. Almost as much for their benefit as for their site visitors. So, over the years, the web became more interconnected. The sites that many people found useful ended up having more links to them.

Skip forward a few years and enter Google and its method of helping people find webpages. There had been several search engines before Google, but none of them were as accurate as Google in helping people find the right webpage match for the keyword they put in.

*How did Google get the most targeted results? *

They used their unique PageRank system to analyze all those webpages that existed on the web. 

They saw that some sites were linked to more than others. Some sites had no links to them at all. They used those existing links as *part* of the way their search engine ranks websites. Each link to a website counted sort of like a "vote". The websites with more links to them were deemed more important by the very fact that more people had *naturally linked* to them on their websites.

So sites like imdb.com (very useful for finding movie info), yahoo.com (used to be the most useful for finding websites about a specific topic), amazon.com (useful for finding books), stanford.edu (college) all had lots of unsolicited links pointing to their sites because thousands and thousands of webmasters found their sites useful. 

On the flip side of that, those "important" sites also had links to other sites. By the same logic, if these "important" sites linked to a site, it would be the same as 1000's of votes from smaller sites.

Skip ahead a few years and you find crafty webmasters trying to learn the ins and outs of the complicated google algorithm so they can get their websites ranked higher than their competitors. They learn that these links are counted as votes, so they figure, hey, lets fast forward the natural process of people linking to my site because I've created something useful. Let's trade links. Then I'll have one more link "vote" and you'll have one more link "vote".

Fast forward a bit and you see Google reacting to all these link trading, link exchange type websites by devaluing that "vote". Now, when Google sees a recipricol link, they see a webmaster trying to circumvent the natural linking process and it doesn't count as much as it used to.

Fast forward to now and we're getting back to where it all started. Ideally, you create a website that people want to link to. Make it useful, make it funny, make it have the most amazing t-shirt designs ever, but make it stand out so people want to link to it naturally from their blog, website, newspaper, etc.

That's what you should be doing now. 

*Make a Purple Cow that stands out above everything else. *

Something that makes people want to talk about it, link to it, write news stories about it.

The best links you can get are (and always have been), one-way links. That's when a site links to you because they think you are cool and not because you have a link back to them.

If you want to add links to your site, don't get caught up in trying to find "link partners" and swaps, just think of cool sites that you like and sites that you think might be useful to your site visitors. They are the ones you need to impress, not a search engine. If you impress them, the search engines will find you just fine.

sorry for the long post...


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## tbiggs (Jan 26, 2007)

Don't be sorry for the long post. I appreciate you taking the time to help me have a better understanding of how things work. In fact, you should compile alot of the posts from your forum and write a book.

Thanks Again Rodney!!!!!!!!!!


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

Here's a page from Google explaining their stance on link exchanges: Webmaster Help Center - Link schemes


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## TripleT (Apr 29, 2007)

> Don't be sorry for the long post. I appreciate you taking the time to help me have a better understanding of how things work. In fact, you should compile alot of the posts from your forum and write a book.


That was a great answer!


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## TShirtReview.com (Jun 5, 2007)

I suggest always trying to trade links. Maybe make a page just for link trade. It will help your google page rank.


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

TShirtReview.com said:


> I suggest always trying to trade links. Maybe make a page just for link trade. It will help your google page rank.


Google doesn't seem to agree with you: Webmaster Help Center - Link schemes


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## TShirtReview.com (Jun 5, 2007)

That's only legal mumbo jumbo. I've read on google's site that "if you link to a site, and they do not link back, it can lower your page rank, so always try to get them to link back to you". I'm not 100% it was on google's site, it may of been on a page explaining how to raise your page rank.


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

> I've read on google's site that "if you link to a site, and they do not link back, it can lower your page rank, so always try to get them to link back to you". I'm not 100% it was on google's site, it may of been on a page explaining how to raise your page rank.


That's not really legal mumbo jumbo. It's pretty clear guidelines on how to make sure you don't run afoul of any Google filters.

I doubt that text you read came from Google's site anywhere.

It sounds like something somebody wrote who was just guessing on how Google works.

I prefer to go straight to the source. They provide some good, basic, easy to understand information on how to do it right.


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## chirundu (Aug 2, 2007)

TShirtReview.com said:


> I suggest always trying to trade links. Maybe make a page just for link trade. It will help your google page rank.


As a web developer and working for a company where we spend alot of time making sure our clients web sites rank well in google, I can tell you that it *IS* important to have links from google trusted web sites (high page rank) that are related to your topic (so sites about t-shirts or clothing) pointing to your site. If you then return the link the amount of "Kudos" you receive for that link is reduced but it is still worth it.

Where it harms you is if you link to sites that are not trusted by google or even black listed by them - these are usually spammy type sites anyway.

As i said we spend a lot of time getting high page rank for clients, and sometimes the difference between being listed no1 or no10 for a term can be the amount of quality inbound links you have.

An important thing to remember that this is not the ONLY way to be highly ranked and it does take time. A new domain (mine for example) will take months before it is trusted by google.

Hope this helps


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## brent (Nov 3, 2006)

How does having 200+ posts on this site, all with my URL in the signature, affect my google ranking? Does google notice all these links from here and give a little more credit to my site?


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

brent said:


> How does having 200+ posts on this site, all with my URL in the signature, affect my google ranking? Does google notice all these links from here and give a little more credit to my site?


Maybe a tiny bit. Nothing worth writing home about. The bigger benefit of forums would be the actual relationships you form with the community you participate in and the potential business that can come from that.


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## analogue (Aug 31, 2007)

brent said:


> How does having 200+ posts on this site, all with my URL in the signature, affect my google ranking? Does google notice all these links from here and give a little more credit to my site?


It will help especially as the site is about t shirts so there will be plenty of relevant keywords. The thing is if google finds one or two links from this site to yours it will see it as a posistve thing, however 200+ won't make much difference on top, if a site links to you that is that, it doesn't really help any more if the site has multiple links, unless they are from pages with different content topics (like a large site like the BBC). So I wouldn't keep posting on here as many times as you can thinking google will add up each link in your sig


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## monkeylantern (Oct 16, 2005)

tbiggs said:


> Hey Everyone,
> The only possible solution that I could come up with is because they have enough money to promote themselves on a larger scale than most and don't really need to optimize.


Major companies are not playing the same game as small-largish companies. We're on the phone to Google. Google come to us. It isn't about SEO. It is not a level playing field. If we go down in natural (or paid) search, we are on the phone to Google and it is fixed.


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## analogue (Aug 31, 2007)

monkeylantern said:


> Major companies are not playing the same game as small-largish companies. We're on the phone to Google. Google come to us. It isn't about SEO. It is not a level playing field. If we go down in natural (or paid) search, we are on the phone to Google and it is fixed.


May I ask waht company you work for monkeylantern?


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## monkeylantern (Oct 16, 2005)

analogue said:


> May I ask waht company you work for monkeylantern?


It wouldn't be appropriate for me to say, sorry.


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## analogue (Aug 31, 2007)

monkeylantern said:


> It wouldn't be appropriate for me to say, sorry.


I've never heard of Google altering thier natural results for another company, it would sureley take all credibility away from them. I know they talk to people about the paid searches (I work for an affiliate marketing company) as these are there to make money fot google. If they started changing the natural results to keep companies happy then people would stop using it.

Without wanting you to reveal too much, what industry are you in?


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## monkeylantern (Oct 16, 2005)

analogue said:


> I've never heard of Google altering thier natural results for another company, it would sureley take all credibility away from them


It doesn't take credibility away at all.

You're looking at this from the viewpoint of a merchant, not a customer.

Say I want to buy some flowers, and I'm in the UK. I google "flowers". I expect to find the biggest flower company as No.1. I expect to find Interflora.

If I don't find Interflora, Google has failed in it's primary aim; to organise natural search algorithms so that what the consumer expects to find logically at the top of the list *is *at the top of the list.

Why do you think Google continually tweak their algorithms? It's because they're trying to match, as near as damn it, what would logically be expected to be the results order for any given search.

This is continually tweaked. It's making Google closer to what it should be. THe big daddies get regularly boosted, regardless of SEO. A customer doesn't give two hoots about SEO. They want to find what logically they are looking for.

For a smaller business owner, this might not seem fair

For a customer* this is what Google search is supposed to do*


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

> Say I want to buy some flowers, and I'm in the UK. I google "flowers". I expect to find the biggest flower company as No.1. I expect to find Interflora.


That's a pretty big assumption. That's not always the case.

If you google flowers, you could want to learn about flowers, you could want pictures of flowers, you could want to grow flowers, you could want to buy flowers from a local, small flower shop.

The customer doesn't always want the biggest best shop when they search for a single keyword.



> I've never heard of Google altering thier natural results for another company, it would sureley take all credibility away from them.


I agree, it would take credibility away from Google. Google relys on algorithms, not phone calls to rank websites. 

They may take customer and webmaster feedback into account when tweaking the algorithms, but if Interflora (continuing the example) drops to #5, they don't get to make a call to be #1.


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## monkeylantern (Oct 16, 2005)

Rodney said:


> They may take customer and webmaster feedback into account when tweaking the algorithms, but if Interflora (continuing the example) drops to #5, they don't get to make a call to be #1.


No, but once they are aware that searchers are not getting what would be expected, you can assure the algorithms would be altered to correct that.

My example was perhaps too simplistic and vague. Say I was searching for "t-shirtforums.com run by Rodney". If the first result wasn't the t-shirt forum run by Rodney, then the search algorithm is broken.

If another site has SEO'd itself to the top of the list, then however they have done that will be tweaked to ensure it does not happen.

There are many leaks and discussions about the "dark matter" that influences the gravity of Google result rankings. One of the biggest hurdles to perfecting SEO is because the Google algorithms are made infinity complex by secretive "weightings".

There is no such thing as "natural search" in any real sense. "searching" isn't some constant pulled from nature. Natural search is the name for algorithms that conspire to intuit what a searcher is hunting for, and give results accordingly.

What a searcher is looking for is many times more likely to be a major major site. In many ways, the very meaning of "SEO" is trying to mimic in your site the rules that Google is using to define the major major sites.


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## monkeylantern (Oct 16, 2005)

I have a conference paper on this very topic.....I'll hunt out a copy, if it's not NDA'd.....given me a minute.


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## T-BOT (Jul 24, 2006)

monkeylantern said:


> No, but once they are aware that searchers are not getting what would be expected, you can assure the algorithms would be altered to correct that.


correct.

that's what makes google the best search. In my opinion.

i guess it's fair to say that there is a human element in google.  

the abbrevation " SEO " seems so old to me as I read this topic.


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