Chapter 19

Finding Sites to Link to Yours

IN THIS CHAPTER

Bullet Getting other sites to link to you

Bullet Finding who links to your competition

Bullet Looking at reciprocal link campaigns and much, much more

Bullet Buying links — the ins and outs

In Chapter 18, I explain the value of linking — why your site needs to have backlinks (links from other sites pointing to it). Now you have the problem of finding those sites.

Chapter 18 gives you some basic criteria. You need links from pages that are already indexed by the search engines. Pages with high PageRanks (or pseudo-PageRanks) are more valuable than those with low PageRanks. Links from related sites may be more valuable and so on. However, when searching for links, you probably don’t want to be too fussy to start with. A link is a link. Contrary to popular opinion, links bring value — even links from unrelated sites.

It’s common in the SEO business to say that only links from “relevant” sites have value, but I don’t believe that’s true. How do search engines know which sites are relevant and which aren’t? They don’t. Sure, they can guess to some degree. ...

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