Increasing External Links to Your Website
As part of the criteria used in ranking sites, spiders have built into their formula (called an algorithm) a factor that takes into account external links, or links from other sites that link to your site. In the past, having a large number of external links was a very important factor in acheiving high search engine rankings.
However, over time, many people tried to trick the spiders by setting up artificial or fake links pointing to their site.
Are External Links Still Helpful?
Yes, external links are still beneficial if the following conditions are present:
- The site with the external link should be related to your site. If your site is about used books and Joe’s Car Shop links to you, it won’t help.
- The site should be liked by Google. In other words, if Google doesn’t like the site that is linking to you, it won’t help your ranking.
- The site linking to your site should be using plain text HTML for their link. If the site is not linking to you properly, the spider might not be able to follow the external link to your site.