Chapter 4
Vetting Inbound Links
In This Chapter
- Identifying inbound links
- Avoiding poor-quality links
- Dealing with link spam issues
- Cleaning up spammy inbound links
In the previous chapter, we discuss how inbound links can help and hurt your website, and how to tell good links from bad ones. Inbound links are the links pointing to 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 its 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 it reads 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 about!” Unfortunately, as is true of a lot of things in life, there are good inbound links and bad inbound links.
The previous chapter, looks at how to attract good links; now, in this chapter, we help you identify any bad inbound links and then tell you how to get rid of them (at least as far as the search engines are concerned).
Identifying Inbound Links
So how do you know who’s linking to you? Well, in Chapter 3 of this minibook, we explain how to attract links from other sites. You may publish link magnets or invest in your online relationships. Sometimes a site ...
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