Short Guide on How to Choose a Reliable Link Partner

While artificial intelligence algorithms are still in their cradle stage of development, major search engines have adopted a method of sites’ indexing involving a different type of intellect activity. What is beyond search engine crawlers’ power, can always be performed by Internet users and makers. Among numerous filters search engines employ to select and classify sites, there are very few of those, executed by webmasters themselves. Link partner selection, is probably the most responsible and crucial of all them.

The old proverb says “Content is Power”, but the role of backlinks is now so vital, that it has become another powerful means driving your site to the desired top 10. For a search engine optimization rookie, gathering links might turn out to be a serious challenge. To make a long way short, read our advice on how to find really valuable reciprocal links for your sites without drowning it in the the depths of the search engines.

1. The first thing you want from your link partner is to make sure his/her resources pages are indexed by Google, in particular the page, where your link must appear. You can easily check that by opening Google and typing in: site:www.domain.com/links.html or cache:www.domain.com/links.html – remember, you do not need “http://” for this and there should be no space between the advanced operator and the site’s page URL. If Google shows the link page, it has been successfully indexed and you can proceed to step 2.

2. Do not close the Google window, now click the “Cached” link in the search result window (if there is no results, you will probably want to consider another link exchange partner) and check if you can see the anchors of other sites that are visible on the live link partner’s page by the moment you got there. Today, there are hundreds ways to have a page indexed without having a single outbound link, located on it, be indexed by search engines.

3. Once you made sure the links are visible, aim the mouse pointer on the links and check if they are indeed linking to another site. I have seen many sites, who have an outbound link look like this: http://www.domain.com/www.linkpartner.com. This might happen in two cases: Webmaster’s carelessness (missing http:// prefix) or deliberate intentions to trick Google bot. In both cases you will probably want to skip such a site.

4. Number of links on the resource page. This is a well-known rule for every web-master. No more than 100 links on a single page. Even though the Google bot might crawl 200 and even 300 links, you don’t want to have your link numbered 80 or so. Another fact is that if the page has a page rank it will most likely be distributed among top sites only, bottom links get bits and pieces.

5. You don’t want a link partner who uses frames on his resource page, as the text and links in the frame are not indexed by Google. And even though this problem has a temporary nature, in the near future little will change about it.

6. Done with the technical part of the analysis, let’s proceed to another factor. All the links located on your resource page should exist for the benefit of the Internet user who might take interest in exploring more sites related to the subject matter. For this purpose, make sure the themes of the sites, you are linking to, correspond to the name of the category on the links page and the categories, in its turn, are related in a way to the business your site is conducting. Well organized, human edited links will serve for the benefit of both: your site’s visitors and the site itself.

The technical examination of the resource page of you potential link partner described above will take from 30 to 60 seconds of your precious and will give you the confidence, you might be lacking. Unfortunately, we were unable to provide live examples fraught with some problems for us. We hope that this post will appeal to your vigilance in searching link partners and familiarize newly-fledged webmasters with most common seo scams.