Linking
The
links on your site constitute a
very important part of how Google and other search engines will rank
your
pages.
Links
can be categorized into
inbound links , outbound links, and cross links :
Inbound links
These
links point to a page on your
web site from an external site somewhere else on the Web.
Outbound links
These
links point from a page on
your site to an external site somewhere else on the Web.
Cross links
These
links point between the pages
on your site.
Broken Links
It's
quite important to a search engine that none of the links on your site
is
broken . It shouldn't be that big a problem to go through your site and
check
to make sure each link works manually. Doing this will also give you a
chance
to review your site systematically and understand the navigation flow
from the
viewpoint of a bot.
Even
though you've checked your links manually, you
should also use an automated link checking tool. Quite a few are
available. A good
choice is the simple (and free) link checker provided by the World Wide
Web
Consortium (W3C) at http://validator.w3.org/checklink
. As you can see in the figure, all you need to
do
is enter the domain you want checked and watch the results as the links
in your
site are crawled. After you've checked your links manually, use an
automated
link checking tool such as the W3C's Link Checker to make sure your
site has no
broken links .
Inbound links
You
want as
many inbound links as possible, provided these links are not from link
farms or
link exchanges. With this caveat about
inbound
linking from "naughty neighborhoods" understood, you cannot have too
many inbound links. The more popular, and the higher the
ranking,
of
the sites providing the inbound links to your site, the better.
PageRank
and Inbound Links
Inbound
links are considered a
shorthand way of determining the value of your web site, because other
sites
have decided your site has content worth linking to. An inbound link
from a
site that is itself highly valued is worth more than an inbound link
from a
low-value site, for obvious reasons.
This
concept is at the core of
Google's famous PageRank algorithm, used to order search results.
However, the PageRank
algorithm by now has more than 100 variables (the exact nature of which
are a
deep and dark secret); many factors besides a recursive summation of
the value
of a site's inbound links do come into play.
Outbound links
The
"everything in moderation" slogan is really apt when it comes to
outbound links. You could also say that the "outbound link giveth and
the
outbound link taketh." Here's why: you want some respectable outbound
links to establish the credibility of your site and pages and to
provide a
useful service for visitors. After all, part of the point of the Web is
that it
is a mechanism for linking information, and it is truly useless to
pretend that
all good information is on your site. So on-topic outbound links are
themselves
valuable content.
However,
every time your site provides an outbound link, there is a probability
that
visitors to your site will use it to surf off your site. As a matter of
statistics, this probability diminishes the popularity of your site,
and Google
will subtract points from your ranking if you have too many outbound
links. In
particular, pages that are essentially lists of outbound links are
penalized.
Cross links
Cross
linkslinks within your siteare important to visitors as a way to find
useful,
related content. For example, if you have a page explaining the concept
of
class inheritance in an object-oriented programming language, a cross
link to
an explanation of the related concept of the class interface might help
some
visitors. From a navigability viewpoint, the idea is that it should be
easy to
move through all information that is topically related.
From
an SEO
perspective, your site should provide as many cross links as possible
(without
stretching the relevance of the links to the breaking point). There's
no
downside to providing reasonable cross links, and several reasons for
providing
them. For example, effective cross-linking keeps visitors on your site
longer
(as opposed to heading offsite because they can't find what they need
on your
site).
In
addition, from the perspective of making money with site advertising,
you want
to have dispersal through your site. One page that gets 100 visitors is
much
less lucrative than 100 pages that each gets one visitor. The aim of
effective
cross-linking should be disperse traffic throughout the pages of
relevant
content on your site.
