Chapter 4: Vetting External Links
In This Chapter
Identifying inbound links
Avoiding poor links
Identifying quality links
Making the most of outbound linking
Handling advertising links
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 ...