Let's Talk About Links

[Robert]

There is a new article at Search Engine Guide written by Bill Hartzer:

Let's Talk About Links
http://www.searchengineguide.com/hartzer/003067.html

Snippet:
A good mix of both incoming and outgoing links is important, although some would say that incoming links are by far more important than outgoing links. And others will say that you will absolutely not be found in the search engines for your website's topic unless you have incoming links to your website. That's all fine and dandy, but how do you get links to your website?

[wayne h]

The article mentions that blog links are being discounted by Google. The writer probably means that blog comment links are being discounted. Links from within the blog content and from the blog's link list certainly are given full value.

The confusion between links from blogs, which are treated like those from any other website, and links from blog comments, is a common error. It's a misconception that needs to be cleared up as there is much misinformation about blogs out there.

In fact, Google owned Blogger even provides a model of how to make a clean html link, for users of that free blogging system.

A link from a blog link list (often called a blogroll) is more powerful than a link from most traditional website's links pages. The link from a blog is usually directly from the blog's home page and will almost always be written in clean html code.

Even more powerful than a link from a links list (blogroll) is a link from within a blog post (column) itself. The link will be surrounded by keyword and theme relevant content. The link will often be keyword rich in anchor text as the blogger will regularly use part of a sentence from the content. That sentence fragment will very often contain the receiving blog's most important keyword phrase.

In summary, a link from a blog is given full credit from the search engines, including Google, MSN Search, and Yahoo. The possible downgrade is in the blog comments, and not the blog contents.

Wayne Hurlbert

[Search4news]

Thanks Robert and Wayne for the information.

I was under the impression that incoming links were better. The question is how to get quality links to your website and avoid link farms?

[thejenn]

Wayne is right, but knowing Bill, I think it was just an error of semantics. He was talking about the fact that the new link attribute can block the benefits of blogspam and guestbook spam...not that no links from blogs count.