Forward linking – link neighborhood strategies

As we noted in our Your Link Neighborhood Tutorial, who you link to is one of the factors which determines Your Link Neighborhood. But why should search engines care who you link to? Because search engines know that one of the values of a website is to be a good resource to other sites on the web. We always need to remember that the search engines want to return quality, relevant results, and quality resource sites fit that bill. As such, linking well is an important part of establishing Your Link Neighborhood and thus an important part of helping your search engine ratings.

What’s more, linking to quality sites is much easier than getting links. Indeed, it is the only linking factor which is totally under your control. So therefore, we recommend that you follow We Build Page’s forward linking advice and link out to “the best authorities within your industry” while avoiding linking to sites which have no relevance whatsoever to your site. At the same you want to avoid becoming a dead end site, one which doesn’t link out to any sites at all.

Remember, forward links are the easiest links to come by. There’s no reason, therefore, not to make it part of your overall linking strategy.

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Your Link Neighborhood

As we mentioned in our Link Evaluation Tutorial, one of the factors that is important to search for when evaluating the quality of a (potential) incoming link is the “neighborhood” of that link. Today’s search engines are less interested in mere numbers of links and are starting to consider other factors, one of which is Your Link Neighborhood. What, you might ask, is a link neighborhood? It is basically the community of websites that your site “hangs out in” as determined by a number of factors. According to We Build Pages (www.webuildpages.com), there are five factors which collectively determine Your Link Neighborhood (see Why is Who You Link To important?). /p>

They are the following:

1. Who links to you (i.e., your backlinks).
2. Who links to the sites which link to you.
3. Which sites have common backlinks to yours.
4. Who you link to.
5. What topical neighborhood your sites linking structure lies within.

And to top things off, how about a few pictures to help us visualize what a link neighborhood “looks like”. Here are a couple of illustrations by Jim Boykin (CEO of We Build Pages).

The first picture Jim calls “picture of some linking neighborhoods”. The clouds and houses, Jim tells us, should be thought of as separate websites, while we should look at the arrows as links (some one-way links, other reciprocal). You won’t have to look long to see that this is a sports neighborhood, which is why the “SEO” site at the top right is not well located. Even though it has a lot of incoming links, they are links from the wrong neighborhood. As such, sites like these are “slipping in the engines” each and every day.

The second picture can be found in a post entitle
Why that site with 50 backlinks beats your site with 1000 backlinks (you’ll have to check out the post to see the picture). In that post Jim explains why a limited number of quality, topically related links (i.e., from within Your Link Neighborhood, are more important than a large number of low-quality, unrelated links. He tries to show illustratively the importance of being “in the center of the activity” by getting “the right links (the hubs and the authorities)”. This picture helps show why “getting a few of the right links from the right places can be more valuable than getting 100 links from the wrong places”.

The moral of the story: if you want to long-lasting, high rankings for a variety of search terms in a variety of engines then makes sure that you are well connected in your natural link neighborhood.

Sources:

• Why that site with 50 backlinks beats your site with 1000 backlinks
• Picture of Link Neighborhoods
• Why is “Who You Link To” important?

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