Chapter 4: Vetting External Links

In This Chapter

check.png Identifying inbound links

check.png Avoiding poor links

check.png Identifying quality links

check.png Making the most of outbound linking

check.png Handling advertising links

check.png Dealing with link spam issues

In this chapter, we discuss inbound links. Inbound links are the links coming into your site. If you are Bob’s Classic Car Customization, and you get a link from Motormouth Mabel’s Classic Car Boutique, that’s an inbound link. In addition to rankings by content, part of how search engines rank pages is based on inbound links. Google’s description of their PageRank system (a part of Google’s link algorithm) for instance, notes that Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote of confidence, by page A, for page B. That means that they read an inbound link from another page as a testimonial link in your page, as if it means, “Hey, this guy knows what he’s talking ...

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