Questions based on the great link exchange

[Cornish Steve]

Rather than interrupt the flow of the great link exchange, I thought I would ask my questions in a new thread.

1) Being a complete novice in the area of Internet marketing, I am unfamiliar with some terms that you guys are using. What is a page rank, why is it important, how can I determine my page rank, and how can I improve it?

2) I don't mean to sound exclusive, but I really can't exchange links with most of you. My target market is quite specific and it extends across many countries. It would undermine my marketing strategy to add links that are irrelevant to my site visitors.

I have a thought, however. Is it possible to create a page that is not accessible from my home page (and hence not known to site visitors) yet is visible to a spider? Would links posted at such a page count just as much as links posted at my home page? That way, I could exchange links with everyone without a moment's hesitation.

[Rob Holmes]

Hi Steve,

All very good points/questions and I'm pretty sure theres alot of people in exactly the same position.

I'll have a stab at working through them ;)

1) Being a complete novice in the area of Internet marketing, I am unfamiliar with some terms that you guys are using. What is a page rank, why is it important, how can I determine my page rank, and how can I improve it?

Heres how Google describe their pagerank... http://www.google.com/technology/ I have to say the sites at the top of Google are not those exclusively with a high pagerank (it's only from 1 to 10) BUT it is another (fairly important) factor in how Google ranks your page(s)

2) I don't mean to sound exclusive, but I really can't exchange links with most of you. My target market is quite specific and it extends across many countries. It would undermine my marketing strategy to add links that are irrelevant to my site visitors.

I reckon we're all in this boat, we want our visitors on our sites to purchase our products not be distracted by irrelevant links to other companies. They way around this is simple and you cover it below...

I have a thought, however. Is it possible to create a page that is not accessible from my home page (and hence not known to site visitors) yet is visible to a spider? Would links posted at such a page count just as much as links posted at my home page? That way, I could exchange links with everyone without a moment's hesitation.

The links page MUST be accessable from your site but not necessarily from your home page. We give people on the forum a direct link to it but actually the Search Engine Spiders find it from our additional services pages (around 8 of them) heres an example: http://www.matrixxhosting.com/web-rescue.shtml - see the left menu bar? Just click on the links 'link' :)

We also ensure people don't leave our site by making the links open up a fresh browser window - this way we don't lose visitors.

Hope this helps a little,

Rob

[epiphany]

1) What is a page rank, why is it important, how can I determine my page rank, and how can I improve it?

2) It would undermine my marketing strategy to add links that are irrelevant to my site visitors. Therefore is it possible to create a page that is not accessible from my home page (and hence not known to site visitors) yet is visible to a spider?

I'll answer as well :D

1 = It's a rating of your site out of ten given to you by google. You can see what this is by installing google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com/en_GB/ ).

You can improve your page rank by:
a. Getting more people to link to your site that have content relevant to your site. Links back to your site from non relevant sites still count towards your page rank but not as much as a relevant link
b. Adding more good original content to your site.

2= It may undermine yes However your links page needs to be connected to your main site. If someone cannot navigate to your links page, search engines wont pick it up and wont rank it properly, which will mean people wont want to share links. If it is linked from your main page but it is more that three layers deep into your site then search engines will again also have problems with it. The short answer to this question is no, if you want to link exchange you need to make the page accessible or you are not being fair to the people you are exchanging links with.

[Pete Williams]

I thought I would post here as well, although I think the link exchange is an excellent idea, I understand that reciprocal linking can be detrimental so I suggest a triangular effect, eg:

Company 1 links with company 3

Company 3 links with company 2

Company 2 links with company 1

etc...

With a bit of thought it would work, then we all get the links but do not get penalised for the same content.

[Webstuff]

Thats a really good idea!

I've been thinking though; how are people keeping up to date with links? Are people checking back regularly to add other peoples? If the list gets big, how will people organize categories (Google, amongst others, disregard or pay minimal attention to any links past a certain number).

[Rob Holmes]

I don't necessarily agree with what you're saying but you could get it working by using 3 different include files that were called from a central place - that way only 1 person need be responsible for adding the links and the rest would update automatically.

I was thinking of a single include page myself that people could tap into.

But then theres the howto/education issue..

Rob

[Ozzy]

I've had an email from someone asking me to remove the link to their site as my sites are not relevant to theirs. Just to cover the relevance point, there is also importance in quantity when getting inbound links to your site. Think of it like 20x links from other sites carry the same weight as 1x link from a relevant site.

Pete's comment is very good and ideal, but will cost time and money to get a system like that up and running. Volunteers? :)

[MinuWeb]

I don't necessarily agree with what you're saying but you could get it working by using 3 different include files that were called from a central place - that way only 1 person need be responsible for adding the links and the rest would update automatically.

I was thinking of a single include page myself that people could tap into.

But then theres the howto/education issue..

Rob

Thats a good idea, and not too difficult to implement.

Provide a sample page with the includes already in it, if people want they can add a header / footer, (can put comments for where these should be) if not just leave it as it is and upload it & link to it.

That should be enough for the people that don't understand how to add includes function.

[Rob Holmes]

Pete's comment is very good and ideal, but will cost time and money to get a system like that up and running. Volunteers? :)

Hmm.. It's just a case of adding links to 1 page just alternating between 3 different pages - there is a slight formatting issue where those with a links page embedded in as part of their shopping cart for example may not be able to do this. This may exclude some people although they could just add another page and call it something different and link to it from their site.

I want to volunteer myself but I'm run ragged at the moment so I'm not going to - sorry :( !

Rob

[Webstuff]

I'm busy at the moment, prepping for a house moving buggery-doo-da (sorry, you know how it is). The triple link system could work well if we generated all the links off a central database. People could then update their pages as and when (..), and there wouldn't be too much hassle.

A problem I think of again though is getting too many links on one page.

Ideas?

[epiphany]

Anything that sounds dodgy like that probably is and therefore would have the potential to get you banned from Google which is certainly not something you want to happen :) I am not saying this is definitely the case but just that I think it sounds dodgy :)

[Webstuff]

Its a great idea, just the too many links thing is a worry. Come up with an idea I can claim as my own please, epiphany ;)

[epiphany]

Hmm, keyboards with chocolate F1, F2 etc keys that you can eat when hungry?

[Kay]

Just for info, you don't have to install the Google toolbar to check PR. There are several free online tools around which let you do this. Just search "Google PR tools" or similar.

I like this one because it also attempts to predict future PR:

http://www.rustybrick.com/pagerank-prediction.php

HTH

Kay

[Webstuff]

It's really bad at it though :P

(He says, whilst eating his function keys...)

[Webstuff]

No, wait, I'll just dump "n links per page". I'll see if I can get any of it done now, with my mouse that can go left, right, and down only.

[epiphany]

:D

I used to use this pr tool quite a bit but soon realized the predict feature was rubbish, which is the case for any one I have seen

http://www.searchengineengine.com/

The page rank tool within Google tool bar is a cool feature and lets you see the page rank of any site instantly, which is good is you are a busy bunny :)

[Ozzy]

The problem with Google PR is that its not as important as it sused to be, but is still believed to be. More importance is now placed on intelligent agents that read the site and "work out" if it is a real site or a doorway/junk site. It then calculates how many other sites relevant and non-relevant link to it to work out the importance of the site. Then it ranks it, and not just on keyword relevance.
I have seen websites on the front page of Google that do not contain a single word I have searched for (in the natural listings before someone mentions adwords ;))

[chris1317]

Cheers epiphany,

That site is useful, most just give you the PR on its own and not all the links/backlinks too.

Chris.

[Kay]

Re Google PR predictor: It's really bad at it though

:lol: I've not found anything to be reliable - alexa, marketleap, et al. Most of it is only useful to amuse those who don't know any better. Or those, like me, who sometimes like to indulge in work avoidance activities.

[Rob Holmes]

Epiphany, Webstuff, anyone else..

Could you try out something?

I've created an include page will you see if you can hotlink include on it for me?

The full path is http://www.matrixxhosting.com/link2.inc

It's unformatted so should pick up any css if the page has a css attached.

I've not tested this method for SEO before - I'll try and get my head around if theres anything similar happening around the web at the moment.

Thoughts, opinions (on this subject ;) ) ?

Rob

[Ozzy]

I like it :)
I've included it in my Links page and it works well. I just need to adjust my stylesheet to get the formating to match in with the rest of the site, I'll probably also create a separate UKBF links page from my main links page as they look a bit different.

Umm, me wonders... If my developer could add a tick box to the UKBF members profile page which says "Include in Link Exchange" and then the homepage URL automatically gets included in an include file.

[Webstuff]

Its works fine - so long as your servers can handle every request made, thats a perfect option for everyone with PHP servers :P

[Webstuff]

Ozzy - many members have more than one website... maybe you could use the forum header files (the ones that check for a good login) to allow members access to a link management area?

[Ozzy]

I had thought of that as part of a future plan I do have for UKBF but that is a little way off yet as I have some "paying work" that is taking priority to focus on at the moment. The basis though was a members business directory.
If someone wants to give me a quote to write that addon feel free to PM me but it is a long term job not likely to be done for a few months.